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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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SPIRIT AND LIFE 



THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY 



y6Y 
AMORY H. BRADFORD, D.D., 

First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J. 



One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost. 
The Problem. — Emerson. 




NEW YORK 
FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT 

1888 






THE LIBRAitY 

OF CONGRESS 



Copyright, in 1888, 
By Amory H. Bradford. 



TO MY FATHER, 

WHO THROUGH A LONG PUBLIC MINISTRY, AND STILL 

MORE IN THE CIRCLE OF HIS HOME, HAS 

ILLUSTRATED '' THE SPIRIT AND 

THE LIFE,'* THIS VOLUME 

IS AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED. 



PREFACE. 



The most important of experiences is that 
which leads to a rational and credible idea of 
God. This cannot be taught in the schools. No 
man or body of men have authority to delineate 
it ; the largest and noblest conception of the 
Deity ever possessed, even though imparted by 
revelation, has been at the best but a ^' broken 
light.*' And yet, on clear views of God hang the 
glory and usefulness of human life. If there is 
no God, there is no hope, life is a dream, and he 
is happiest who knows no waking. If God exists 
but has no care for men, or is interested only in 
the universe and not in individuals, then for us it 
were as well if there were no God. 

The sermons in this volume revolve around two 
thoughts : (i) God has manifested himself in a 
form which can be understood by men. The In- 
carnation is not simply a dogma of theology, 
but something demanded by the heart of man, 
and — spiritually discerned — appealing to his 



O PREFACE. 

highest reason. It gives the only adequate con- 
ception of humanity, and the only definite 
idea of God. The Incarnation is '' the light 
of men'* concerning Deity, duty, destiny, and 
is the standard by which all pretended revela- 
tions are to be tested. It has relation to all 
time, and to all the universe. The Being dis- 
closed in the Christ is the God of all worlds and 
of the eternities, and all things are in his hands 
and will be forever. The Incarnation, in short, 
condenses all that is revealed of God, and of his 
purpose concerning man. (2) The Deity is never 
far from humanity ; he is always in contact with 
our spirits, and ^' the spiritual life '' is the life of 
God manifesting itself through the spirits of men. 
The Holy Spirit is not^' an influence," but God 
himself in spiritual operation and manifestation. 
The Christ declared that his work would be con- 
tinued and completed by the Spirit which would 
abide forever in Christian hearts. This is funda- 
mental. God is in living relation with all who 
submit their wills to his will, as it is made known 
in conscience and in Christ. Those who do that 
need no human teacher : they are led and inspired 
by the Spirit of God ; they ^' have an anointing 
from the Holy One." 

These sermons are none of them polemical. 
Indeed, controversy about the infinite, and eternal 
among those who, however much they may differ 
among themselves, are all moving in the same 



PREFACE, 7 

direction and seeking the same ends, is sheer 
absurdity. If any good has resulted from the 
"• battles of the theologies '' in the past, it has been 
only because God has made the wrath of man to 
praise him. 

Without attempting any orderly discussion of 
dogmatic themes, I have brought together here 
a few of the results of a pastor's practical labor, 
and offer in these discourses something of what 
a patient study of God's Word and a reverent 
scrutiny of his works — *^the two revelations'* — 
have suggested to me concerning the Spirit 
and the Life. The fact that these partial views 
of truth have helped many in a narrow field to 
more satisfying conceptions of God, and to a 
more constant reliance on his Spirit in their 
search for truth, and in their attempt to face 
bravely the conflict and mystery of life, is the 
only excuse for offering them to an audience 
which may be larger and may be smaller. 

Of the following sermons, the four on *' The 
Holy Spirit '' and the one entitled '' The Appeal 
to Experience " have already appeared in The 
Christian ^ Union, "The Vicarious Principle in 
the Universe '' was read before the American In- 
stitute of Christian Philosophy, and " The Condi- 
tions of Spiritual Sight " was the first sermon 
preached before that Institute. Both have been 
published in Christian Thought. ''The Theologi- 
cal Thought of our Time " is the substance of the 



8 PREFACE, 

Baccalaureate Sermon before the class of 1884 of 
Wellesley College. It was afterward published 
in The Advance. The remaining sermons of the 
volume now appear in print for the first time, and 
all of them were originally prepared for my own 
congregation. 

A. H. B. 

First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J., 

August 20, 1888. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Holy Spirit the Fundamental Doctrine 

OF Christianity, 7 

II. The Holy Spirit in Individual Experience, . 29 

III. The Holy Spirit and Christian Work, ... 47 

IV. The Holy Spirit a Constant Factor in the 

Problem of Progress, 67 

V. Conditions of Spiritual Sight, 89 

VI. Theological Thought of Our Time, . . .111 

VII. The Incarnation, 133 

VIII. The Vicarious Principle in the Universe, . 157 

IX. The Appeal to Experience, 183 

X. The Life, the Light of Men, 205 

XI. The Invisible Realm, 223 

XII. The Endless Growth, 243 



The Holy Spirit the Fundamental 
Doctrine. 



" We can only have an absolute harmony of opinion as to the 
Bible when there are no more new truths to be derived from it, 
or new questions raised concerning it, when its interpretation is 
perfected, and research regarding it completed. That will not 
be, I believe, before the day of doom/' — Robert Flint, D.D., 
LL.D. 

*' The words of the Christ have not their ground in an exter- 
nal authority. The signature of their authority is not in the 
instrument in which they appear, but their verification is to the 
Spirit. Their justification is to the conscience and the con- 
sciousness of men." — Elisha Mulford, LL.D. 

'* He is Thy best servant who looks not so much to hear that 
from Thee which himself wills, as rather to will that which from 
Thee he hears. "—St. Augustine. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT, 

THE FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 



The Holy Spirit the Fundamental Doc- 
trine. 

'* I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is 
come, he will guide you into all truth." — yo/in xvi.'i2, 13. 

St. Paul says that when he was a child he 
thought as a child, but when he became a man 
he put away childish things. Experience brings 
wisdom. The proportions of things change with 
our years. What once was all-important be- 
comes unimportant ; what was once scarcely no- 
ticed becomes the truth that regulates thinking. 
I have come to believe that the most funda- 
mental and practical of all the doctrines of 
Christianity, for our time and for all centuries 
since the Apostles, is the doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit. This conviction, which to some may 
seem exaggerated, and to others unfounded, is 



lO SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

the result of a study of the teachings of Christ, 
and of the conditions in which men live. 

Let us consider certain facts. These facts all 
rest on the accepted truthfulness of the Chris- 
tian Scriptures. Nothing is to be questioned. 
Only undoubted facts are considered. The first 
of these is: 

Christianity is a life. It is not a philosophy. 
A man becomes a Christian by being born from 
above. A man is a Platonist who accepts the 
philosophy of Plato, and a Kantean who accepts 
the philosophy of Kant, and a Calvinist who 
accepts the philosophy of Calvin ; but a man 
may believe all the teachings of Jesus and be a 
devil. Not belief, but life, makes a man a Chris- 
tian. Jesus gave no system of philosophy. His 
scattered teachings are no more like theology 
than a vase of lilies and roses is like a text-book 
on botany, or than the stars are like a book on 
astronomy. He who has Christ's life is a Chris- 
tian, whatever his name. *^ Whosoever loveth 
is born of God." He who has not Christ's life 
is not a Christian, whatever he believes. How 
is this life communicated? By voluntary choice 
of Jesus Christ as Master and Lord, by the sub- 
stitution of his life for our life. He who thus 
opens himself to Christ receives the very life of 
God. That, I think, is a fair statement of the 
faith of Christendom. But now certain search- 
ing questions arise. 

How can we get life by connecting ourselves 



THE HOL V SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. 1 1 

with One who has been dead and out of sight 
for nearly two thousand years? How can we, 
in any but the most abstract and figurative way, 
come into relation with him? ^^ But," some one 
says, " we are inspired by the words he spoke ; 
we touch his thoughts/' Yes, but his words 
in themselves are no more than any other words. 
Apart from himself his characteristic teachings 
have no remarkable meaning. Any carpenter 
could say, ^^ If you confess your sins, you will be 
forgiven ;" but w^hat would it amount to ? Jesus 
is believed, not because of what he taught, but 
because of what he was. And I am asked to 
take the word of a dead leader ? No, there must 
be something deeper and more vital than that 
for my faith to rest upon. ^^ But Jesus is not 
dead ; he has risen, and lives in heaven with 
God.*' I do not see that that helps matters 
much. If our faith must bridge an abyss either 
of time or space, if there is no present personal 
relation with some one who is as truly alive and 
as near as ever, I, for one, must give up the 
whole scheme. Those who lived when Jesus lived 
may have believed in him because of his mighty 
works. But we did not live then, and he has 
died, and thus submitted to the same law to 
which we are subject ; and if death ended his 
ministry, there is no reason for thinking more 
highly of him than of others. He cannot give 
life. Moreover, if he is in some remote heaven, 
you and I cannot go to him ; he might transform 



12 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

me if he were on the earth, but he is absent. If 
he has left us, that ends the matter. 

Thus we are brought to the fact that the work 
which Jesus began must be carried on by some 
one who can get as near to the thought and will of 
man as Jesus did, or the growth of his kingdom 
will end in a dream. Soldiers will never long 
follow a dead leader. His memory may be re- 
vered, and may inspire for awhile, but the only 
man who can lead the generations is one always 
present and always alive. 

There is apparently no person on the earth who 
can speak with the authority of Christ. Roman- 
ists claim that prerogative for the Church ; and 
the Pope, as the head of the Church, to be the 
vicegerent of Christ. If I were preaching to 
Romanists, it might be well to argue that point ; 
but as I am addressing those who do not believe 
it, I will let it pass, only remarking that there 
is nothing of the teaching of Christ extant on 
which to base that claim. It rests, not on Scrip- 
ture, but on tradition. 

And now I come to something about which I 
ask careful attention. It has been thought best 
by some to ignore or cover up facts because it 
was feared that they would weaken faith. But 
an unsettling will be the greatest of blessings to 
those whose faith can be weakened by fuller knowl- 
edge. There is a great gulf between refusal to 
think and intelligent faith. 

Can the Bible take the place of Jesus Christ 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL, 1 3 

in the world? No: there is no reason to think 
he ever thought it would. Life cannot come 
from a book; life can come only from life. 
Christ never once referred to the composition of 
the New Testament. It is a book. It is com- 
posed of the same words as any other book. To 
learn what those words mean we must study 
uninspired grammars and lexicons and become 
acquainted with languages which have been dead 
for hundreds of years. There has not, so far as 
known, been a single manuscript of the original 
writings of the Bible preserved. There is no 
copy of any book of the Bible extant which was 
made less than three hundred years after Christ. 
Some of the books are not complete even in 
copies — as the Gospel of Mark. The authors of 
many of the books are unknown — as the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. The copies possessed have not 
been kept free from errors in transcribing, or 
from interpolation — as, for instance, the pas- 
sage in John's First Epistle about the '' three 
that bear record in heaven," w^hich is eliminated 
in the Revised Version. Some of the earlier 
copies differ widely from the later ones. The 
question of what books should be in the New 
Testament was never settled by our Lord, nor 
with his authority, so far as we know. For three 
hundred years after his time there was not una- 
nimity among his followers on this subject. No 
General Council of the Church ever passed upon 
the question of the canon. Individual Christians 



14 . SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

are dependent on translations. We read the 
English Bible, the Germans the German Bible, 
and so on through the languages of the world. 
Missionaries translate the Bible as soon as they 
can, and they do right ; but what endless correc- 
tions they would make if they knew Hebrew and 
Greek, Chinese and Hindustanee, better ! All 
the consecrated scholarship of missionaries has 
not yet made a translation of the Bible into 
Chinese which will not be materially changed 
within a few years ! I speak of Goethe, and you 
say, "■ O, it is impossible to translate his finest 
passages. There is in them a fragrance too 
evanescent for translation.'* If that is true of 
Goethe, how much more true of David and of 
Job ! Of the teachings of Jesus not one of us 
ever read one word in the language in which it 
was spoken. He spoke in Aramaic ; what they 
remembered of that which he spoke in Aramaic, 
his disciples, years after his death, wrote down 
in Greek or Hebrew, and we read still another 
translation in English. If we w^ere to get the 
very manuscript which Matthew wrote, we 
should find all the words which Jesus spoke to 
be translations of recollections of those words. 
Consider these facts, and then remember how we 
dispute about words, how great quarrels grow up 
because we do not use words alike. If we had no 
other faith but that in the Bible, which we gladly 
accept as the Word of God, would our religion 
rest on an immovable foundation ? Have words 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. I 5 

such invariable significance that they can be 
implicitly and universally trusted ? 

We have not only to read, we have to inter- 
pret, the Bible. The real Bible is not the words ; 
for they, in different arrangement, exist in other 
books. The real Bible is the meaning which the 
writers meant to convey by means of those 
words. If we would find its exact significance, 
we must not only get at what it seems to mean, 
but at what those w^ho wrote it meant. But you 
say, '' That is plain to all who are willing to 
know." Let me ask, then, how two such conse- 
crated men as John Calvin and John Wesley 
should have differed so widely concerning its 
teachings. Persons speaking the same tongue, 
and living near each other, use the same words 
with different meanings. One man has made 
nine different translations of one Latin hymn ; 
he finds something new in it each time he trans- 
lates it. Compare Carey's Dante with Longfel- 
low's, or Pope's Iliad with Bryant's. Words do 
not always mean the same to different men when 
other books are read ; why do we suppose they 
can have but one meaning when the Bible is 
studied ? Does salvation depend upon our use, 
or upon anybody's use, of a grammar and lexi- 
con? upon the pointing of a vowel, or the placing 
of a preposition? That would be a poor founda- 
tion for faith. Moreover, to be absolutely sure 
of the meaning of an ancient writing, we must 
know the circumstances which caused it to be 



l6 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

written, and the object of its composition, and so 
on, almost endlessly. 

And yet — that jailer at Philippi cried out, 
"What must I do to be saved?" and was bap- 
tized, without ever having seen a word of the 
New Testament. That Japanese who came to 
this country, working his passage, to learn more 
about Jesus, had seen only one leaf from the 
Gospel of John. He is now a leader in the new 
civilization in Japan. Missionaries make con- 
verts before they make translations. The story 
of Uncle Tom and Eva is in a work of fiction, 
but it is history also. Multitudes who did not 
know His name when they saw it have had new 
life from Christ and have died for him. And so 
I am forced, not reluctantly but gladly, to the 
conclusion that there is some power in the world 
which does not come from that tomb in Palestine, 
and which is more vital than can possibly be put 
into a book, even though that book were written 
by the very finger of God. Suppose that, when that 
Japanese landed in Boston seeking to know Jesus, 
he had learned that the leaf he had read was 
from a novel, and that the character was fictitious ; 
suppose he had learned that He was a hero of an 
age long past, and that now He had existence 
only in history, would the sun have risen on 
Japan ? 

Again, Christianity places upon the individual 
the terrible responsibility of choice. It is full of 
invitations. ^^Come! come! come!" This is the 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. 1 7 

keynote of its music ; but to what ? Come to a 
dead Master? Come to a book that is only a 
book — the history of an otherwise forgotten era ? 
If that w^ere all, few would heed the invitation. 
What is it that makes men listen and obey when 
the invitations of Jesus are spoken ? What is it 
that makes the Bible unique among books, and 
even its words germs of life ? Suppose Socrates 
had said, ''Come to me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden," who in this nineteenth century 
w^ould heed him? Jesus spoke the same words 
nearly two thousand years ago, and millions of 
men still go unto him with gladness and thanks- 
giving. '' Choose ye this day whom ye will 
serve." If the alternative was a Master who has 
left this earth forever, or present gratification, 
Jesus would have no followers. Choice is always 
between motives. Who would prefer a dead 
leader, with sacrifice and suffering, to present 
pleasure ? And yet millions of men of strength 
and discernment are choosing to be followers of 
Jesus, and are giving up pleasure, profit, power, 
and enduring toil and pain for the privilege of 
serving him. 

Christianity also teaches the duty of prayer. 
Individuals and the church are not supposed to 
offer prayer to One who is visible or apparently 
near, but to One who is separated by the diameter 
of the space between the physical and the spir- 
itual. Those w^ho judge simply by what is visi- 
ble, naturally consider prayer the greatest of 



15 SPIRIT AND II FE, 

absurdities. ^^ The idea! You Christians kneel 
in your homes and churches, and expect that 
your words v/ill pass through walls and up 
through spaces and reach the ear of One who 
is imagined to be at the same time listening with 
equal intensity to millions of others. Prayer to 
One to whom you are visible and who is visible 
to you is conceivable, but prayer to a far-away, 
invisible King — why, it is absurd, that is all ! If 
God is beyond the stars, how long will it take for 
our voices to reach him ?" This is the way that 
those who are not Christians talk ; and, if there 
is nothing more to Christianity than a dead 
Christ, a book which millions never can understand 
aright, a solemn command to pray to an absent 
God, then that is the way we also would talk. 

We have thus considered some of the chief 
doctrines of Christianity, and have found that by 
themselves they are lifeless and comparatively 
useless. We are, however, overwhelmed by our 
consciousness of sin and our need of Divine help 
and pardon. Sin and suffering are eternal facts. 
They knock at Nature's door and will not go 
away. Breaking hearts come to Christianity as 
to a forlorn hope. There must be help in that, 
or there is nothing in the universe but desolation 
and death. What gospel, what good news, for 
those who come with agony and remorse to Cal- 
vary, and find there nothing but a cross and One 
hanging upon it — dead ? They will go away say- 
ing, *^ This deepens the darkness ; death is the 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. 1 9 

only hope — perhaps that leads to unconscious- 
ness ; let us die." 

These facts make indispensable what I have 
presumed to call the fundamental doctrine of 
Christianity — that is, the one which makes 
truths otherwise barren and dead to glow Avith 
immortal life. Men want some one to save 
them and to sympathize with them now. If sal- 
vation depends on a knowledge of Greek and 
Hebrew, on accuracy of copying, on correct in- 
terpretation, most will think that there is little 
chance for them. If prayer is to a far-away God, 
and our voices must reach beyond the stars, most 
will not care to pray. But Christianity teaches 
that Christ died, and rose, and ever liveth. He 
said to his disciples, ''It is expedient for you 
that I go away." The Comforter, he said, could 
not be present while he was in the flesh. Why? 
Because men then were like men now. They 
were thinking about everything but the spiritual- 
ity of his mission ; they were haggling about 
ofifices ; they were asking who should be greatest ; 
they were jealous of one another ; they were anx- 
ious for personal recognition. *' It is necessary 
for you that I go away, in order that you may 
understand that the real Christ is spiritual, and 
his mission a spiritual mission." But did he leave 
men? He said, ''I will send the Comforter," 
but that word " Comforter" in the original is the 
same word which is elsewhere applied to Christ 
himself. John, in his epistle, says, '' We have an 



20 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

Advocate with the Father," and the word ''Ad- 
vocate" is exactly the same word here translated 
" Comforter." Christ also said that he would come 
again, and that those then living should see him. 
As Jesus Christ was God in human relations, con- 
tinuing a work for the salvation of men, so the 
Holy Spirit is God carrying on that work, not far 
away but nearer to men now than Jesus himself 
ever was, as spirit can get nearer to spirit than 
body to spirit. How near can spirit get to 
spirit? My friend's body may be in China; 
my friend's spirit is in my spirit, so that I 
think his thoughts and do as he wishes. My 
friend's body is in the ground mingling with 
the common earth, but he himself is here, more 
intensely alive than ever, so that I live to carry 
out his purposes. Paul said, *^ Christ liveth in 
me." That was literally true. God, not far away 
and unloving, but as near as spirit can get to 
spirit ; God, not leaving us to a book that he has 
inspired, but coming nearer than any book can 
come, and then helping us to understand that 
book; God, not asking us to cry so that our 
voices can pierce the spaces, but telling us to re- 
member that he is nigh us, even in our hearts — 
this is the teaching of Christianity concerning the 
Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is more than an 
influence distilled from the upper air. He is not 
manifested chiefly, nor usually, nor perhaps ever, 
in emotion or ecstasy or the absurd frenzy which 
among ignorant people masquerades in the dress 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. 21 

of piety. Only a living Saviour can reach and 
uplift humanity. 

Jesus expressly declared, just before his 
death, that he had not revealed all the truth that 
he wanted men to know : '' I have yet many things 
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." 
But he does not stop there ; he continues : ^^ How- 
beit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will 
guide you into all truth." This teaches that, just 
as Jesus brought the Gospel to earth, so there 
are other messages to come from God to men, 
by the Spirit of God in their hearts. When will 
they be spoken? He does not tell. Who shall 
voice them ? He does not answer. He leaves 
that whole mystery, just as the mystery of his 
coming was left among Jewish women. Each Jew- 
ish woman, in the vague and holy anticipation 
of motherhood, wondered if she would not be cho- 
sen to be the mother of the Messiah ; and each 
Christian, high or low, humble or prominent, lit- 
tle child or aged man, should live so that, if the 
Spirit of God shall choose to voice through him 
some truth for which the w^orld has waited, he 
will be ready to receive and utter it. Christ de- 
clared that all truth was not known when he died ; 
and all truth is not yet known, and will not be 
known for centuries and millenniums. Unwise and 
disobedient are those who hear only voices from 
the past and expect none in the present or the 
future. Christ recognized the need of something 
more than grammar and lexicon in order to un- 



22 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

derstand the Bible. Of the Spirit he said : '' He 
shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you ;'* 
that is, make plain the words already spoken but 
not understood. Again he gathered his teaching 
on this subject into a single sentence and said : 
" He shall teach you all things " — that is, the 
truths not yet revealed — '' and bring to your re- 
membrance all that I said unto you." 

We are following not a dead, but a living. 
Leader ; we have now with us One who interprets 
the things which Christ spoke, and who, if he 
wishes, may use even those living to-day for the 
expression of truth of which the world has never 
yet heard. Is there any reason why God's Spirit 
could use a fisherman to voice a divine message in 
the first century, and not be able to do the same 
in the nineteenth ? Is there any reason to think 
that God has exhausted himself, and has no more 
to tell men ? Or are we already so wise that we 
need no more? God is not dead, and he is not 
limited ; God, not far away and inactive, but in 
human hearts, carrying on now, without visible 
form, exactly the same work that our Master be- 
gan in the flesh — this is the fundamental doctrine. 

And it is more than a doctrine. It is some- 
thing manifest and almost demonstrable. There 
was nothing of Christianity in the world but a 
dead criminal, a dying thief, a few faithful 
women, and one half-hearted man : that was all 
which could be seen. From that day until the 
present a new force has been at work. That man 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL, 23 

who was apparently dead has been most intensely 
alive. The suffering have gone to him, and have 
realized what he meant when he said, '' My peace 
I give unto you ; ** those whom remorse had al- 
most driven mad have gone to him, and we have 
seen them sitting clothed and in their right mind ; 
those who were dishonest, impure, intemperate, 
debauched in body and soul, have become the 
helpers of the world's salvation simply by follow- 
ing him. O, it is a wonderful story, how, from 
faith in him, men have gone up on chariots of fire 
with songs on their lips ! How, from faith in him, 
women have taken their lives in their hands and 
gone to the uttermost parts of the earth, simply 
to tell how good and helpful he is ! How, from 
trusting in a present Father, families which have 
been broken have found the space betv/een the 
seen and the unseen but a step which is soon to 
be taken ! How those who could not read even 
a word of their Bible have believed as seeing Him 
who is invisible, and gone through the sins and 
sorrows of earth with the sunlight on their faces, 
simply by keeping their hearts open and pure ! 
It is wonderful how God, by his Spirit, has chosen 
the weak of the earth to confound the mighty. 
A miner's son, who sang in the streets for his 
bread, led the Reformation and unbound the 
Bible for the world. A farmer, with the Spirit of 
God in him, laid broad and deep the foundations 
of England's liberty. A jail-bird was so trans- 
formed that he was able to write the storv of 



24 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

Pilgrim's Progress. In the praying of four coun- 
try boys under a haystack was the beginning of 
American missions. A lonely man, with the liv- 
ing Christ in his heart, who died in the attitude of 
prayer, with his head pillowed on his Bible, trav- 
ersed Africa from ocean to ocean and opened the 
path along which civilization and religion are al- 
ready moving, and this with no object but to 
tell men of Jesus and his love. Christ said that, 
when he went away from sight, he w^ould come 
again ; that his work should go on ; that his word 
should be interpreted ; that new truths, and new 
light on old truths, should be given ; and never 
were words spoken which have been more abun- 
dantly or evidently verified. He said to his disci- 
ples, *^ Because I live^ ye shall live also ; '' and he 
says to us, '^ Because I live^ ye shall live also.'' 

The Holy Spirit verifies all the characteristic 
doctrines of Christianity. He shows us that we 
follow a Leader who is not dead, but who is Lord 
of life ; that giving up his body did not destroy 
his power, but that this was the condition of its 
proper and permanent exercise. He is with each 
one who, willing to learn, reads the Bible, and 
takes care that he shall find in its pages the truth 
which he most needs. He is with us when we 
pray — nearer than our nearest friends ; he lives, 
and he gives us our life ; and the history of the 
last eighteen hundred years, v/ith its prophecy of 
better days, with its brightening hope, with its in- 
crease of brotherhood, with its peace for the sor- 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL, 25 

rowing, with its triumph for the dying, has em- 
phasized with ever-deepening emphasis the 
words of him who said, ^* I will not leave you des- 
olate ; I will come to you/' 

It follows, from what has preceded, that atti- 
tude of will is more important than knowledge of 
truth. Men may be situated so that it is impos- 
sible for them to study even their Bibles. I once 
talked with a man about his soul, and he spoke 
to me something as follows : "^ I was born in a 
coal-mine, in England. I was never taught to 
read. I have had to work so hard that I have 
never had time to learn. I don't know anything 
but how to dig in a mine. How can you expect 
anything of me ?" More than half the world is in 
the same condition, and they cannot get out of it 
if they try. The most of the Bible, even if they 
read it, they cannot understand. But God is near 
them, and the important thing for them, as for 
us, is to keep all the faculties open, so that when 
he comes he can get in. If Christianity wxre a 
philosophy, it might depend on education and en- 
vironment. It is a life — God's life in man — and 
he who says to God, '^ I do not know much about 
you, I do not know much about anything ; but I 
know that I am a sinner, and I want to be better, 
and whatever you tell me I will do, even if it is to 
die" — that man is open to God, and in his heart 
the life will grow ; and, from obeying God as He is 
revealed to him, he will learn more of God than 
from a thousand preachers and a million books. 



26 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

When one comes to me and talks about the con- 
stitution of the church, and says It is this, while 
another says It is that ; and when one says that 
I have not obeyed Christ if I have not gone 
under water all over, while another says it makes 
no difference how baptism is applied ; and when 
one says, " You should accept this confession of 
faith,'' while another says, *^ You should accept 
that," — I may be pardoned if I become confused 
and wonder if anything is really known. The con- 
fusion of the denominations, the battles of the the- 
ologies, are enough to disturb even the elect. If 
any one here is thus troubled, I say to him, '' My 
brother, Christ said to his disciples that his Spirit 
would lead into all truth. Trust that Spirit. 
Ministers are fallible ; churches are fallible ; hu- 
man powers are fallible. Those who have most 
confidence in themselves^ are usually most dis- 
trusted by their neighbors. Do not look toward 
men ; look toward God. He cannot go wrong, 
however weak, however ignorant, who trusts in 
God to lead him. Trusting in God to lead is 
trusting in the Holy Spirit. We may be excused 
for ignorance which we cannot help, for natural 
dullness, for little time, for inherited bias ; but 
nothing can excuse us for not keeping our hearts 
open to God. Persistent refusal to do that is the 
unpardonable sin. 

This, then, is the conclusion of all. Our eyes 
may misread the Bible ; those who are set to in- 
terpret it may give us their own theories instead 



THE HOLY SPIRIT FUNDAMENTAL. 2/ 

of Christ's truth ; our circumstances may keep us 
in darkness which we cannot break: but nothing 
except our own will can prevent us from knowing 
what we ought to know, and from doing what we 
ought to do. If a single human being turns sin- 
cerely to God for guidance and help, and receives 
no answer of light and power, I am ready to say 
that I cannot see how such a Holy Spirit as Jesus 
Christ promised can have any existence, or Chris- 
tianity itself be anything but a dream. 



II. 

The Holy Spirit in Individual 
Experience. 



*' Everything is mysterious, nothing is magical, in the process 
of conversion; the laws of our nature are observed therein, and 
we do not for a moment cease to be men." — Alexander Vinet. 

** Christ is risen, and is a living presence in the household of 
his disciples, more a presence in his invisible church to-day than 
he ever was in the synagogues of Palestine, or even the upper 
chamber of Jerusalem. The resurrection of his body is a parable 
of a diviner resurrection, the uprising of the spirit when he has 
made it to live in him, endowed with a new being, and already, 
here and now, in fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus 
Christ, entering into life eternal." — Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

** If the Holy Ghost were withdrawn, the Christ would be 
absent and of none effect to us. But if the Holy Ghost is pres- 
ent and active in us, we dwell in the full flood of the light and of 
the life of God, and of his Christ." — A. A. Hodge, D.D., LL.D. 

'* Our blest Redeemer, ere he breathed 
His tender last farewell, 
A Guide, a Comforter, bequeathed 
With us to dwell. 



And every virtue we possess, 

And every victory won, 
And every thought of holiness 

Are his alone." Harriet Auber. 



II. 



The Holy Spirit in Individual 

Experience. 

*' And as for you, the anointing which ye received of him abid- 
eth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you." — i John 
ii. 12. 

The Christian life is begun and sustained by 
the opening of the heart to a Spirit. It is not 
physical life. Its beginning, its continuance, and 
its consummation are all in the Spirit. We 
know what our hands feel and our eyes see ; we 
know also what we believe and whom we love. 
A bruise on the body hurts ; a bruise on the af- 
fections is equally painful. A fracture or a sprain 
causes suffering ; broken ideals or strained rela- 
tions between friends cause suffering even more 
intense. That which concerns the spirit is as 
real as that which concerns the body, and far 
more permanent. The appeal of Christ was to 
the spiritual nature. Not once did he enter 
into rivalry with those who offered something 
material and visible. His disciples thought he 
came to found a kingdom : he said, *^ The king- 
dom of God is within you." His disciples 
looked for outward signs: he said, ''The king- 
dom of God Cometh not with observation." 



32 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

He came to those who were lonely and de-solate, 
but gave them no visible friend ; he simply told 
them to lift their eyes and behold their Father — 
a Spirit. He came to those who expected an 
earthly deliverer, and went about improving their 
condition by forgiving their sins. There is a 
deep symbolism in the fact that he healed a man 
sick of the palsy by saying, ^* Thy sins be for- 
given thee." By that he said, practically, " Get 
your spiritual nature right and the physical will 
take care of itself.'* All that he did for the body 
was in order that he might reach the soul. 

Christ began his movement on the moral life 
by an appeal to the spirits of men. He told 
men that they were what their hearts were. 
^* You judge by the outside ; that is Pharisaism ; 
God judges by what men think and will and love. 
Murder is not the killing, it is hating ; adultery is 
not outward act, but inward thought ; prayer is 
not simply asking for something — a man cannot 
begin to pray until he has done all he can to put 
himself in right relations with those who feel un- 
kindly toward him.'' He said that the new life 
was from God, who is a Spirit ; that its beginning 
was viewless, like the wind, and its growth silent, 
like that of a seed. When he went away from 
the earth he left everything to the Spirit. So 
far as we know, he never wrote a word ; he left 
no book or letter or will ; he impressed his spirit 
upon the spirits of a few common people. He 
did not found a church; he did not organize a 



THE SPIRIT: INDIVIDUAI EXPERIENCE. 33 

society ; he did not write the Bible ; he lived 
and taught and died — that was all which was vis- 
ible. Before he died, he told his followers that 
when he was gone they would have an imvisible 
and spiritual substitute for him ; that that substi- 
tute would recall his words to their remembrance, 
and show them what he himself had intended to 
teach, — would lead them into all truth. He 
named this guide ^^ the Spirit of truth." And this 
Spirit of truth is to remain. ^^ I will pray the 
Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, 
that he may abide with you forever." 

On the earth our Lord made his appeal en- 
tirely to the spiritual nature; now that he has 
gone, the Spirit of truth remains. The life of the 
child of God is life in the care and under the guid- 
ance of the Spirit of truth. The time will never 
come when the appeal will be m^ade to any but 
spiritual motives. And any growth of organiza- 
tion or creed or ritual is earthly if it calls atten- 
tion to itself and obscures our vision of God and 
of the love and service due to the immortal 
spirits around us. Christ teaches us to look at 
men, not as animals — movable bodies who may 
get in our way and have to be pushed aside ; not 
as things which may be put under our feet ; but 
rather as fellow-spirits. Man is more than a 
mass of matter to stay in its present position un- 
til the cement which keeps its particles together 
fails to hold ; he is the spirit-child of the Spirit- 
God. His organized body will become dust; 



34 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

spirit is indestructible. Thus are we to think of 
men. 

Life under guidance of the Divine Spirit is the 
life of the disciple of Christ. We put our aspira- 
tions into the hand of God, and his desires and 
ideals for us become our own desires and ideals. 
We put our hearts into God's hand, and what he 
chooses becomes our love for time and eternity. 
This may, to some, appear hard ; but those who 
seem to be living without love are only waiting 
for God's Spirit to lead them to their true and 
lasting affinity. We put our minds under the 
guidance of the Spirit of truth, and the man who 
does that cannot long believe an error. 

Each man lives in two worlds ; in the upper 
world are spirits, in the under world are bodies. 
Man is like a steamship, in whose dark and lu- 
rid depths are a score or more of blazing fur- 
naces ; at their open mouths stand half-naked 
men feeding them — heat, force, noise, confusion 
everywhere. If there were nothing but furnaces 
and engines, stokers and engineers, the steamer 
would soon be on the rocks. In those depths are 
fires blazing, engines throbbing, wheels turning 
— nothing but force ; it cannot see icebergs nor 
avoid breakers. Left to itself, steam is an agency 
of destruction ; but guided by intelligence, that 
force impels steamers, runs mills, spins cloth, 
binds the world into brotherhood. There is 
more to a steamer than furnaces and engines. 
Up in the light is a compass pointing northward ; 



THE SPIRIT : INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 35 

up in the sky is a star always telling where the 
north is ; on the deck is a man alert to know 
which way is north — a man who is guided by 
compass and star. Now, let the star stand for 
the Spirit of God, and the captain for your spirit 
and mine. The captain is directed by the star, 
and he in turn puts his hand upon the wheel 
w^hich connects with the rudder; thundering 
cranks, ponderous shafts, and that fierce and ter- 
rible screw straightway become obedient, and the 
ship, like a thing of life, flies wath a thousand 
souls on board from continent to continent, be- 
neath benignant skies, through howling storms or 
blinding fogs. The higher life, itself under the 
direction of that which is highest, controls all be- 
low it. The ship's rudder is bound by invisible 
lines to the north star ; and the earthly life of 
every Christian is thrilled by inspirations from 
the Spirit of God along lines equally invisible. 
Without that Spirit man would be like a steamer 
amidst icebergs and breakers and fogs and 
storms, with furnaces roaring, engines thundering, 
screw hurrying, w4th no rudder, no captain, no 
north star. 

This, then, is the first point emphasized to-day. 
The w^hole Christian experience is primarily and 
predominantly spiritual. Everything in business 
and politics and society is subservient to the 
Spirit of God. 

Everything in the kingdom of God is individ- 
ual. The principle of solidarity never interferes 



36 SPIRIT AND LIFE, . 

with individuality. In the profoundest experi- 
ences each is alone. Deepest griefs are incom- 
municable. Each is responsible for himself. 
There is no companionship in death. You and 
I are parts of the universe, and yet isolated from 
every creature. The sunlight rests upon all cre- 
ated things, and yet it singles out a lily-of-the- 
valley and a violet and pours its splendor on 
them as if there were no other flowers. The 
Spirit of God is for all men, and yet it is equally 
for each man. Each is dealt with according to 
his peculiarities. It does not follow that because 
we are all led by one Spirit we shall have the 
same theological opinions, any more than the 
same political opinions ; all will not be impelled 
to go as missionaries, or to use the same forms of 
worship. Individuality is a universal principle; 
everywhere the created thing is true to what dis- 
tinguishes it, and the Creator reveals himself ac- 
cording to the laws of the object through which 
he works. God made men individuals, and it is 
probable that he means they shall continue such. 
Christ called his disciples individually ; he loved 
them individually ; he died for them individually. 
The appeals of the Gospel are to individuals ; its 
invitations are to individuals ; and the heart of 
each man craves individual recognition and help. 
Can you think of your children only in a group, 
and never separately? Do you love them in a 
lump ? Do you not adapt your training to the 
peculiarities of each ? Do you expect the same 



THE SPIRIT : INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 37 

things of the obtuse child as of the bright one ? 
Do you hold the deHcate, frail little creature to 
the same standards of accountability as the one 
who is strong and well ? Do you not ask wheth- 
er your child knew what you wanted before pun- 
ishing him for not doing? Do you give the same 
advice to your boys as to your girls? One mian 
is a poet, and the Spirit deals with him as a poet, 
and makes him a David, or an Isaiah, or a John ; 
or, coming to later times, a Milton, or a Tenny- 
son, or a Whittier. Another has the gift of ex- 
pressing truths in symbolical or pictorial forms, 
and the same Spirit leads him to paint a Madon- 
na, or a Holy Family, or a Crucifixion, or to 
copy the colors of an autumnal landscape, or to 
show men God's beauty in the flaming splendors 
of a sunset. One has what we call mechanical 
genius, and the same Spirit makes him an in- 
ventor, a finder-out of nature's secrets, who causes 
steam to do the work of horses, makes cold and 
sullen metals breathe celestial harmonies, shows 
how invisible elements can carry messages of love 
and hate. Another has the faculty of expressing 
spiritual truth so as to be helpful to men, and he 
becomes a teacher or preacher. And all these are 
led by the same Spirit. It is not necessary that 
all should know their leader in order to feel his 
influence. Many are debtors to the Spirit of God 
who do not know it or will not confess it. He 
moves upon hearts as the wind upon an organ, 



38 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

bringing from each pipe the music which it is 
voiced to express. 

He follows us wherever we go. That moth- 
er's face gathered out of the air, looking with 
tender, tearful, beseeching eyes, just as you were 
about to commit an awful sin, — where did it come 
from ? That voice which seemed to speak your 
very name clearly and distinctly in the midst of 
a thousand voices, — whose was it? That mes- 
sage from a stranger; that note from an old 
song ; that word spoken in church by one who 
never interested you before and which went 
straight to your heart, turning your w^hole nature 
toward hopes to which you had long been dead ; 
that faithful, hopeful, unreproachful, loving hand 
outstretched to you just at the moment when 
you felt that there was nothing ahead but a 
grave not far off, — who sent them to you? The 
peace and strength which have come to you like 
dew on a crushed flower, and which found you 
when you buried your heart and said, ^^ There is 
nothing for me now but desolation and death,'' 
— where did they come from ? And that pa- 
tient, tireless, prayerful ministry of friends who 
will not stop praying for you whatever you do, 
and those silent influences which cannot be es- 
caped, — whence are they? That unrest which 
will not cease until the profoundest questions of 
existence are answered ; that consciousness of 
isolation which separates a guilty soul from all 
the world and makes the very air seem full of 



THE SPIRIT: INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 39 

blazing eyes staring at him, — whence are these ? 
And, last, and most wonderful of all, that strange 
and mystic force which, as silently as the day 
dawns, turns from selfishness, sensuality, and 
stubbornness, reveals a Father whose love is 
as fathomless as that shadowed by the cross, 
opens possibilities of service beginning here and 
ending never, changes the discord and despair of 
life into the music of endless hope, — whence is 
it ? These things cannot be from the depths, for 
the hands in the depths reach up to drag down ; 
they cannot be from those who are blind like 
ourselves ; they are explicable only as the fulfill- 
ment of the promise of Him who said, ^'I will 
not leave you comfortless, I will come to you," 
and who said also, ^' He knoweth His own sheep 
by name." 

'* How may we know whether we are led by 
the Spirit or not ?" Well, how do we know any- 
thing ? Test it, negatively and positively. 

One thing may be laid down as an axiom : 
We who have reason and eyes and ability to de- 
cide between right and wrong ought seldom to 
be guided by mere impulse. People pray for the 
Spirit to lead them, and expect an inward im- 
pulse ; that is as likely to be wrong as right. It 
is absurd for a person who has powers of dis- 
cernment to depend on impulses. They are no 
indication of the Spirit's leading. 

The Spirit never leads a man to do a selfish or 
unkind thing, nor anything which, unless hin- 



40 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

dered by some outside force, will cause pain or 
injury to another. The Spirit is God continuing 
Christ's work of salvation without the physical 
manifestation. Am I led to do to some one 
around me something which, in the exercise of 
common honesty, I know the Lord Jesus Christ 
would not do if he were in my place ? Then I 
am acting from selfish motives. The Holy Spirit 
continues and extends the work of the Saviour; 
he never contradicts it. This principle can be 
easily applied. It tears the masks from multi- 
tudes of shams. Some, because of lack of per- 
sonal recognition or fancied neglect, find an out- 
let for pique in desperate devotion to some ^^ prin- 
ciple " for v/hich in their hearts they care little. 
This is not of the Spirit. Loyalty to truth for 
truth's sake is always from God. The Spirit 
never leads a man to do an unkind, an ungener- 
ous, an unmanly thing ; it never leads him to say 
of another that which he would be unwilling to 
have said of himself, if it were true ; it never 
leads him to misrepresent any truth, although 
the smallness of his nature may compel a partial 
and imperfect understanding and expression of 
truth. Nothing is from the Spirit which vio- 
lates the teaching or example of Christ. This 
excludes the wild, hysterical, maniacal manifesta- 
tions of ignorant religionists seen now chiefly at 
Southern and Western camp-meetings ; it shows 
the inspiration of those who defend truth with 
the methods of the devil ; it characterizes those 



THE SPIRIT: INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 4 1 

who sit in chief seats in Christian churches and 
nurse hate and plot mischief ; it shows the mo- 
tive of those who sell truth for money, and, from 
fear of high or low, keep back part of the mes- 
sage they were sent to deliver ; it shows in their 
true light those who luxuriate in wealth and 
ease and grind the faces of the poor, forgetting 
that the image of God was never yet utterly 
worn from any man. 

If, now, we turn to the positive side of the 
question, we find it easy to determine whether 
we are led from above, or not. 

Christ said, ^' He shall glorify me ; for he shall 
take of mine and shall declare it unto you." If 
the teachings and work of Christ are becoming 
more real to us, if in him we are more and more 
seeing the One who, if we w411 follow, will lead 
to the true and right life ; if we are more and 
more anxious to do his will ; if w^e are led to de- 
vise loving and helpful things to those around 
us, then we are led by the Holy Spirit. But if 
we are inclined to '' get even" with those who 
criticise or insult us, to speak unkindly, or to do 
anything dishonest or unfair, the Spirit is far 
away. 

Christ said, '' When he is come, he w^ill convict 
the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, 
and of judgment." When we are led to see our 
own lives as not only unsatisfactory but wrong ; 
w^hen we are followed by remorse because of 
having wasted powers which were given for use ; 



42 SPIIUT AND LIFE, 

when there rises the fearfully real question, In 
what will all this end ? we are under the influ- 
ence of the Spirit of God. Some are troubled 
because they realize their imperfection and are 
dissatisfied when they stand in the light of what 
conscience requires and Christ teaches ; but that 
is always a good sign. There is more hope for 
any other than for one who is satisfied. The 
first business of the Holy Spirit is to make a 
selfish, worldly, pleasure-loving soul uncomfort- 
able ; and while discomfort may be no sign of 
improvement, it is a sure sign that you are not 
forsaken of God. 

Christ said, " He shall teach you all things.'' 
If with the years there comes a clearer perception 
of the possibilities of man, a fuller disclosure of 
what it means to be a child of God, a deeper 
insight into the purpose and plan of the creation, 
a truer appreciation of the fact that the millions 
who throng this planet must reach the heights 
of perfect manhood, even though it be by slow 
processes of growth, struggle, and conflict — then 
we may know that we are led by the Spirit ; for 
we are being taught concerning those things to 
which the teaching of Christ pointed, but about 
which it did not clearly speak. 

The Apostle Paul said, '' The fruit of the Spirit 
is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, 
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.'' He did 
not say that all these graces will be found in 
each individual before it can be known that the 



THE SPIRIT: INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 43 

Spirit is there ; but where any of them are, there 
the Spirit is, and where all are, there is a soul 
full of God. "^ By their fruits ye shall know 
them." 

The promise of Christ was that the Spirit 
should be with men and never leave them. The 
Spirit of God is everywhere that God is. Where 
is that? Let the Psalmist answer: ^* If I ascend 
up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make my 
bed in hell, behold, thou art there ; if I take the 
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost 
part of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead 
me and thy right hand shall hold me.'' Where 
is God? Here. Everywhere. How may I 
know that I am touched and guided by the 
Spirit? I cannot get away from God. How 
may I know whether he leads me ? By asking 
and answering one question — Have I surrendered 
my will to him ? If you have, you are led by 
him. If the consecration is only partial, you are 
trusting God for certain things and trusting 
yourself for others. The Spirit leads us just so 
far as we will let him. ^^ But how may I know 
that he leads me in any given case?" Just as we 
know anything else. There is a train going east ; 
if I get on I shall go in that direction. An hour 
passes. Do I know which way I have gone ? 

Let us now, for a moment, return to our text. 
When years had made sweeter and richer the 
experience of the man who was nearer to Jc^ius 
than any other, the Apostle John wrote to his 



44 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

dear people at Ephesus these words : " The 
anointing which ye received of him abideth in 
you, and ye need not that any one teach you." 
He was writing to men and women hke ourselves. 
They had no more advantages than we have. 
They were surrounded by a peculiarly vicious 
civilization, in which there were more agencies of 
evil at work than now. And yet he said to them, 
You have the Holy Spirit in you, and do not 
need any human teacher. In these days, when 
we have turned av/ay from the simplicity of the 
time in which those nearest to Christ could thus 
speak, and have substituted creeds and cate- 
chisms and standards almost without number, it 
is an inspiration to get back to the simple teach- 
ing of him who said. You need neither books, 
nor sermons, nor confessions — helpful as these 
may be ; only one thing is essential, and that is 
that you keep your spirit wide open to the 
Spirit of God. We have largely lost confidence 
in the ability of God to lead his people and to 
do for them according to his own purposes. We 
feel that we must build fences and pile protec- 
tions and make rules where the Apostle said. Ye 
have need of none of these things. You are in 
God's hands. Does God need the help of books 
and ceremonies and rituals and edicts? 

I am persuaded that the chief peril of spiritual 
religion is, not novel views in theology, nor the 
inrush of a new philosophy which thinks of visible 
things as a growth rather than a mechanism ; but 



THE SPIRIT: INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. 45 

the danger is that men shall forget that God is as 
near to their spirits as the air to their bodies, and 
that the humblest child and the profoundest 
scholar are equally blind without him. This 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the present and ever- 
living Christ, not beyond the stars, but even in 
our hearts, making clear, in his own time and way, 
everything which it is needful for us to know — 
our Teacher, our Comforter, our Helper, our 
Advocate, our never-dying and never- leaving 
Friend, the only infallible Interpreter of the word 
of God — this is the truth which makes it possible 
for us to wait and work and rejoice. This it is 
which shall support us, '' in the midst of time 
and twilight and midnight and sorrow," until 
day dawns and the shadows flee away. 



III. 

The Holy Spirit and Christian 
Work. 



" Christ carries on the work of redemption to completion 
through the Holy Spirit whom he sends." — Dr. I. A. Dorner. 

** The real life of humanity becomes henceforth the life of the 
Spirit." — Elisha Mulford, LL.D. 

* ' For whether thou bear a scepter or a sledge-hammer, art 
thou not alive ; is not this thy brother alive ? * There is but one 
temple in the world/ says Novalis, ' and that temple is the body 
of man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before 
men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh. We 
touch Heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.'" — 
Thomas Carlyle. 

** The man most man, with tenderest human hands, 
Works best for men, as God in Nazareth." 

Mrs. Brov^tning. 



III. 

The Holy Spirit and Christian Work. 

" Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit/' 

I Cor. xii. 4. 

Those who most truly realize the circum- 
stances in which they are placed in this world 
are least inclined to dogmatize about the other 
world. In the midst of so much darkness, each 
little ray of light is welcomed. ^^ We walk by 
faith, not by sight.*' About nothing are we 
more uncertain than about spirit. What is a 
spirit? How does it act? Has it form, or is it 
formless like the wind ? Has it any power over 
matter? Can it lift weights and impel bodies, 
or can it move only on something like itself? 
Who ever saw a spirit ? If one were to appear, 
would it be recognized ? The unseen realm can 
be approached only by faith ; the senses can 
neither prove nor disprove its existence. Per- 
haps the surest testimony to a spirit without us 
is the witness of our own spirits within. Deep 
answers to deep. 

There are three stages in the development of 
our thought about these things. The first is 
that of childhood, in which the word of par- 
ents is not questioned. When told of an unseen 



so SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

realm in which God and the Saviour are, child- 
hood does not doubt. It has no evidence except 
the testimony of those whom it trusts. There 
is nothing more beautiful than such faith. Be- 
fore long the child begins to ask questions. 
Who is God? Where is he? What is he like? 
What do you mean by spirit ? Where are its 
days passed? How may a spirit be knoAvn? If 
these questions could be considered by them- 
selves in the quiet of hours devoted to thought, 
answers would be more satisfactory. But the 
period of inquiry is coincident with that in 
which passion manifests itself, with the first 
thrills of ambition and desire, and to consider 
answers in the midst of such confusion and 
conflict is well-nigh impossible. But, whether 
possible or not, the moment a man begins to 
think, that moment the spirit within him which 
he does not understand begins its battle with 
the flesh. The knowledge which comes in 
answer to these questions is seldom readily at- 
tained. Now and then individuals are met who 
talk upon these subjects with easy confidence ; 
but such persons, having only skimmed the sur- 
face of things, are never able to help those 
whose inquiries reach to the depths. Certainty 
concerning spiritual things is usually the result of 
struggle. The light dawns after a long night of 
mental darkness. Young people seldom have 
profound experiences. Consciousness of depend- 
ence comes only from consciousness of weakness. 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK, $1 

from loss and sorrow and pain. I am not so 
much surprised at the imperfections of Chris- 
tians as at the impatience of those who, if they 
know anything of spiritual things, know that 
knowledge and appreciation of them usually re- 
sult from a long and painful process. A child 
learns the material world by coming in contact 
with it and being hurt by it. Not more easily 
are spiritual things learned. We are born babes 
into the new life. Sanctification is always a long 
way from the new birth. A man may be spirit- 
ually growing before he is very spiritual. Con- 
version is not the end, it is the beginning, of 
spiritual life. This introduction has been neces- 
sary to a proper treatment of our subject, TJie 
Holy Spirit and Christia?z Work, 

We use the term " work '* because it is the com- 
mon one, but what we call work is only manifes- 
tation of life. Certain things inevitably follow 
certain other things. A man's conduct is as 
pure and beneficent as his character. If he 
never gives without grudging, if he hoards his 
money, if he is careful as to his interest but not 
anxious to send his dollars about doing good, 
there is only one conclusion : inside he is like the 
outside. If he is censorious and unkind and un- 
charitable, you might as well advise a lump of 
sand to put on the color of a rose, or a piece of 
iron to exhale the fragrance of mignonette, as to 
exhort him to do differently. He must first get a 
new heart. Christian work is always the fruit of 



52 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

spiritual life. To attempt to induce men to be 
generous and helpful and self-sacrificing without 
first helping them into fellowship with the 
Spirit of God, would be as wise as to exhort a 
rock to produce oranges. 

How men work, with the Spirit ! The New 
Testament contains the record of those who 
were led by the Spirit, but gives no answer when 
we ask how the Spirit works. Turn to the biog- 
raphies of inspired men like Clement, Au- 
gustine, Luther, and Edwards, — they are equally 
silent. The men were manifestly swayed by di- 
vine power, but the method of inspiration was 
unknown. Turn to the writers of the New Testa- 
ment. Surely now our inquiry will be answered. 
But when we seek to find how these men did 
their work, the mystery is as deep as ever. We 
believe that they were chosen to preserve for fu- 
ture ages the words of the world's Teacher ; but 
how they wrote, and the relation and proportion 
of the human and the divine in their composi- 
tions, has always been a subject of controversy. 
Sometimes the Holy Spirit is represented as co- 
operating with the human spirit in answer to 
prayer, as on the day of Pentecost. Sometimes 
he moves on men with sudden light, as in the 
case of Saul. The only way in which we can 
get an answer to our question is to study the 
analogies of nature, — God's manifestation of him- 
self through matter. 

How may we work with God in spiritual 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK. 53 

matters? Just as we work with him in phys- 
ical things. God is everywhere, and never ab- 
sent ; it is impossible to get away from him. 
When Christ promised the Comforter, he said 
that he would abide forever. It is proper to sing, 
" Come, Holy Spirit," if we remember that he 
never needs to ** come.'' Consider also the 
power of choice ; each individual can choose 
to work with God, or can refuse to do so. 
This is exactly what one sees in the physi- 
cal sphere. Nature and her laws surround and 
never leave us ; we may work with them or we 
may antagonize them. The soil, the sun, the 
rains, are, comparatively speaking, constant fac- 
tors. If I want a harvest, all I have to do is to 
conform to nature. I plant potatoes and corn in 
soil suited to each, keep the garden free from 
weeds, protect it from animals, and then the sun 
and the rain bring harvests from those hard and 
apparently lifeless seeds. Nothing that the gar- 
dener could do would cause the potatoes and 
corn to reproduce themselves without light and 
moisture ; and the light and moisture might 
have fallen on them for a whole century without 
causing them to grow, had not the intelligence 
and will of man properly planted them. The 
condition of a harvest is that the farmer shall co- 
operate with nature. Nature never changes her 
laws to suit the convenience or caprice of the in- 
dividual. The rains fall, and the sun shines, and 
the seasons alternate without the slightest re- 



54 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

gard for you or me. We can conform to them, 
and our little hands will seem to be doing what, 
after all, the elemental forces alone can do. 
Two gardens are side by side ; the soil is the 
same; they are equally exposed to light and 
rain ; the gardeners are equally skillful. One is 
full of flowers, and the other is a mass of matted 
weeds. One man worked with nature, con- 
formed his will to her will in every respect ; the 
other tried to be independent. Nature is al- 
ways supreme. She can be used only by being 
obeyed. We can light and heat our houses with 
condensed sunbeams if we will bring the coal 
and the spark together. We can *^ hitch our 
wagon to the star*' and make that do our bid- 
ding, if we will first conform to its laws. Obey 
nature and you can work with nature. 

Apply exactly the same principle to the Di- 
vine Spirit : obey spirit and you can work with 
spirit. Conform to God's methods and he will 
v/ork through you ; oppose them and you will 
fall. The harvest of the Spirit is as natural as 
a harvest of wheat. There is a factory full of 
looms and spindles. Cotton is piled in masses 
on the floors; every wheel is idle, a thousand 
men are doing nothing. In a building outside, 
furnaces are blazing, engines are throbbing, every- 
thing seems active ; and yet what is all that 
force doing? Nothing. The factory is silent, 
the men are idle, the engines and furnaces are 
useless, until there is connection completed be- 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK. 55 

tween the two buildings. The belt is slipped 
on the shafts ; movement begins, looms start, 
spindles fly, men are busy. So is it in spiritual 
things. Men do spiritual work naturally, inevi- 
tably, joyously, the moment they submit their 
wills to God. By submission of the will, the con- 
nection is com.pleted between our spirits and 
God's. The power never fails, the ability to re- 
ceive never ceases ; but that power forces your 
will and mine no more than the sun forces a 
farmer to sow his wheat, or than an engine com- 
pels connection with the wheels and spindles in 
a factory. 

Our question was, How do we work with the 
Spirit ? Our answer is. By conforming to the 
laws of the Spirit : by obeying conscience, which 
is God's voice in the soul of man ; by keeping 
our eyes and ears open, our hearts pure, and our 
minds inquiring, in order that the truth may 
reach us ; by forcing our wills to be submissive 
and responsive to God's will, so far as revealed 
to us. 

What are the usual manifestations of the Spirit's 
presence and power ? God's Spirit always recog- 
nizes individuality. No person is ever inspired 
to do what he cannot do, although he is often 
moved to do what seems to him impossible. There 
is diversity of gifts. All music is not of man or 
bird, of wind instruments or elemental forces. 
The beauty of the universe is that of flowers and 
stars, mountains and lakes, cataracts and flaming 



$6 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

skies. A universe of roses or Niagaras would 
not be beautiful. Men are influenced according 
to their peculiarities. There is as much diversity 
manifested in spiritual activity as in physical na- 
ture. But through all the diversity of manifesta- 
tion one purpose clearly runs. The Holy Spirit is 
God continuing, by personal contact with the 
human spirit, the work in which our Lord was 
engaged. That was the work of salvation and 
amelioration ; the two with him were never 
separated. He came to save men from the guilt 
and the power of sin, and to help them to a bet- 
ter earthly life. If you will study his teachings 
and his acts, you will find that these are always 
blended. " The Son of man is come to save the 
lost.'' '^ He shall be called Jesus, for he shall 
save his people from their sins.'' When we 
study his life we find him now saying, " Neither 
do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no more," and 
then opening the eyes of the blind, and curing 
women of their diseases. When he gave his dis- 
ciples their commission, it was in these words : 
*^ As you go, preach, saying. The kingdom of 
heaven is at hand ; heal the sick, raise the dead, 
cleanse the lepers, cast out devils." Christ 
brought good news for the whole life of man, and 
the Spirit continues that ministry, effectively using 
each person for the work which he is best fitted 
to do. John Wesley had spiritual fervor and 
gifts of execution and oratory ; he became the 
leader of a reformation and the founder of the 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK, S7 

most intensely evangelistic sect ever known 
among Protestants. Frederick Robertson, by 
sorrow and isolation, by great knowledge of the 
human heart in its struggles with invisible 
things, by wonderful purity of spirit combined 
with a mental honesty which nothing could 
daunt, was fitted to do what such men as Wesley 
and Whitefield — great and useful as they were — 
could not do ; namely, show that Christianity had 
relation to the w^hole life of man. And God 
used that suffering minister as probably no other 
for a century, to commend his word to men of 
thought, men w^ho, if they ever became Chris- 
tians, must reach the goal by way of doubt and 
conflict. Wesley preached to thousands ; Rob- 
ertson preached in a little church that would seat 
only a few hundred, but he was so earnest, so 
honest, so able to show the reasonableness of 
Christianity, that his words have gone to the 
ends of the earth ; and though he died before he 
was forty, it may be doubted if any man in our 
century has exerted so beneficent and inspiring 
an influence among thoughtful people. These 
men were preachers ; but humanity has manifold 
needs. John Howard heard the shrieks of pris- 
oners ; his prison-reform was as truly in the line 
of the Spirit's work as any revival ever recorded. 
We forget that many live in circumstances w^hich 
make the idea of God an absurdity to them. 
We have comfort ; sorrows come, but blessings 
come also. We see our dear ones die, but we 



58 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

can smooth their pillows and plant flowers on 
their graves. The heavens are not all brass. But 
suppose we lived as those prisoners did who had 
been incarcerated for life, for no crime but desir- 
ing freedom ; suppose we had been separated 
from all loved ones, and condemned to live in 
filth, among vermin, in companionship with the 
vile, without ever having had the chance to prove 
our innocence, would it be so easy to believe in a 
just God? God raises up and inspires certain 
men as truly as he inspired Paul or John, and 
sends them out to so change the conditions in 
which men live that the idea of a better Power 
above may be credible. Mrs. Reaney*s work in 
providing protection for London cabmen in 
storms, and that of Octavia Hill in reforming 
London tenements, are as directly in the line of 
the Spirit as Mr. Spurgeon's. It is well known 
that even Mr. Moody's meetings, the greatest 
since Wesley's, did not touch London's lowest 
life. One preaches ; one teaches ; one seeks to 
improve tenements; one works in the cause of 
temperance, — a better crusade than that to rescue 
the tomb of the Lord ; one cares for homeless 
children ; one tries to make convicts realize that 
they have not ceased to be men ; one has a large 
family of children and no one to help in the 
training, and she simply devotes herself to her 
home; and one never able to do anything pub- 
licly tells, quietly and simply, from friend to 
friend, how God found him a sinner, hopeless 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK, 59 

and useless, and has given him joy and peace. 
All these are impelled by one and the same 
Spirit, for all, in the way in which they can best 
work, are continuing the ministry of Him who 
went about doing good. Get rid of the idea that 
only those who do great things have the Spirit. 
Can you save any one from needless sorrow? 
Can you provide a home for one who has none? 
Can you send a little light into a life that seems 
all darkness ? Can you take one man by the 
hand and walk with him and stay by him until 
the power of temptation is gone ? Can you do 
nothing but make a bright and cheerful home 
for your fatherless family? Can you help two 
stubborn, selfish, unkind men to understand one 
another and to walk together in love ? None of 
these are great things, but if any one of them is 
your work, then not Judson preaching in Bur- 
mah, nor Mackensie, the martyr of the Zambesi, 
nor Wesley leading in revivals which influence 
a nation, is more truly following in the footsteps 
of Christ, or is more surely inspired by the Spirit 
of God. 

All who walk with God according to their 
ability and opportunity continue Christ^s work as 
naturally and inevitably as flowers are made 
fragrant and harvests golden by the life that is in 
nature. We are not to wait for an impulse, to 
do anything : the Spirit illuminates rather than 
impels ; and where a man sees any good thing 
that he can do, he needs no impulse to set him 



6o SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

at work. The fact that he sees it shov/s that the 
Spirit is with him. One thing always character- 
izes those who are in the Spirit : they strive lion- 
estly and at any cost — by humiliation, by shame, 
by confession of error, by sacrifice — so to live 
among their neighbors that all who know them 
shall see in them something of that Christ who, 
when he was reviled, reviled not again ; who 
spent his days in doing for others and never 
asked any one to do anything for him ; who 
prayed for those who were killing him, " Father, 
forgive!" The common work of the Spirit is to 
transform such selfish lives as yours and mine 
into such a divine life as Christ's. 

But there are also unusual manifestations of the 
Spirit's presence and power. While we may not 
think of God as absent, it is equally unreasonable 
to doubt that he moves on single men, or on 
masses of men, for the accomplishment of great 
purposes. This was manifest on the Day of 
Pentecost. Certain individuals in history have 
been chosen for special work and clothed with 
exceptional power, as reforms and revivals have 
proved. In studying them, however, care must 
be taken to separate that which is really spiritual 
from that which is peculiar to the instrument. 
The roughness of Luther was not of the Spirit ; 
a bold man was needed for the work. The hard- 
ness and bigotry of Calvin were not of the Spirit ; 
all things considered, he was the best man for his 
work, notwithstanding his narrowness and hard- 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK. 6 1 

ness. The extravagances of many revivals are 
not because the Spirit is present ; just as many 
would have '' the power" and go into convulsions 
if there were any other cause of excitement. 
From the beginning until now there has been 
this combination of physical and spiritual, and 
each individual has to decide for himself what, 
in a man or a movement, is of the Spirit and 
what of the imperfect agent. But after all al- 
lowances, certain incontestable facts remain. 

The time came when the processes of deterio- 
ration and corruption in the Church of Rome 
could go no further without death. Then Luther 
was raised up and the Reformation began. I 
have been in the room in which that man was 
born, in the library where he first found the 
Bible, have stood on the spot where he burned 
the papal bull, have seen the doors on which he 
nailed his theses, have been in the very cell in 
which he translated the Word of God ; and I 
tell you that no thought keeps pressing on a 
student of that marvelous life as does this : be- 
hind him, moving him, sustaining him, overruling 
his eccentricities, curbing his extravagances, and 
causing all things to work for good, was the di- 
vine Spirit who was the real power. 

Such a period was the great awakening in New 
England under Jonathan Edwards, when the re- 
alities of the invisible world were presented to 
men with a power never surpassed. The preach- 
ing seems to us to have been one-sided and even 



62 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

to have misrepresented God, but none the less is 
the hand of God visible, using those means, im- 
perfect as they were, to make men realize that 
life is solemn and judgment certain. Such a pe- 
riod was the revival which swept over our whole 
nation after the panic of 1857, when the common 
subject of inquiry was concerning the salvation of 
the soul and the glorious power of Him who is in- 
visible. Such a period is now in progress in the 
Scotch universities, where a man, not a clergy- 
man but an African traveler, a Professor of Phys- 
ical Science in Glasgow University, who seems 
full of the Spirit, has been the means of turning 
the hearts of university students toward the spir- 
itual life as never before in the history of Scot- 
land. To question the reality of such move- 
ments is to suspect history; to call them the 
results of machinery is to show ignorance of 
facts ; to question whether God moves on in- 
dividuals or on masses for the accomphshment of 
special benefits is to doubt whether he does 
what we see to have repeatedly taken place. 

There is no law for the Spirit of God which 
man can formulate. This only is perfectly evi- 
dent : all things are slowly but surely moving up- 
ward. As the waters are driven by the wind with 
mighty waves flowing backward and forward on 
the surface, while, down beneath, the great tide 
lifts steadily onward and upward the terrible con- 
fusion of waters, so the Spirit of God is silently, 
invisibly, but surely, lifting humanity toward the 



THE SPIRIT AXD CHRISTIAX WORK, ^l 

divine. This separation of the Spirit's work in 
us and by us, into the common and uncommon, 
suggests two practical thoughts. 

The unusual manifestations of the spirit are so 
entirely out of the range of human calculation 
that we are never to expect them, but ahvays to 
be ready for them. We wait for God to do this 
work in his own time and way. Genuine revi- 
vals are never manufactured. We see what is 
done at such times, and imagine that this is all 
we need to do and the revival will come ; we for- 
get that the real power is unseen by us. It is 
always God's purpose to save individuals and up- 
lift the world, but it is not always his purpose to 
use all for the same work. In unusual manifesta- 
tions of the Spirit the initiative comes from above. 

Yet, in the ordinary life of man the responsibil- 
ity is always on the individual. The povN'er never 
fails. It cannot be limited. You and I can and 
do have all of that power that we wish. If one is 
spiritual and another sensual, it is because one 
puts his will in God's hands, and the other keeps 
a large share of his in his own. Waiting for God 
to move you I Do you not know what is right? 
Waiting for God to make you generous and for- 
giving ! Cannot you be so without special help 
from him ? Waiting for a power to make you 
feel like praying ! Do you not know that you 
need something? Why wait to be driven to ask- 
ing? Waiting to have some one show you the 
truth ! Have you not powers of your own which 



64 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

you trust in everything else? Trust them now. 
None ought to expect impulsion from outside 
tovv^ard prayer, toward search for truth, toward 
obedience to conscience. The Spirit is not to be 
waited for ; he is here. The power never com- 
pels ; it always can be used. God is not needed 
to impel a man to do that which his natural pow- 
ers tell him he ought to do. We might as well 
expect God to impel us to eat when hungry as to 
wait for him to impel us to pray when we feel 
our weakness. The responsibility rests on us. 

Yesterday the earth was white and cold with 
its blanket of ice and snow. Everything was 
somber and gloomy. Even the snow-birds had 
hidden away from the rain, and the trees were 
lonely and sad. I looked on the cheerless deso- 
lation of winter, and attempted to trace the biog- 
raphy of rain-drops. They disappear from sight ; 
but wherever they go, it will not be long before the 
sun finds them and reaches down gently and lifts 
themi into the clear blue of the heavens, keeping 
them there until it has gathered others with them, 
and warmed them. And then it says to them, 
^' You have been up here with me long enough, and 
now I want you to help me in my work of bring- 
ing beauty and gladness to the earth." And the 
drops come down again, and, as they fall, the sun 
shines on them and they answer with the colors 
of the rainbow which arches the land with its 
promise ; and when they reach the earth they fill 
the mouths of thirsty lilies and grasses. By and 



THE SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN WORK, 65 

by the sun calls them back again, keeping them 
once more in the sky for a httle while, and again 
and again sends them down to help in making 
other rainbows and to fill the goblets of other 
flowers. And so the great and splendid sun and 
the small, insignificant rain-drops keep working 
together, painting arches on clouds of blackness, 
drawing flowers from wintry graves, and satisfying 
their thirst with the water of life ; and that pro- 
cess has gone on since the first rose blushed at 
the greeting of the sun, and will continue until 
the Sun of Righteousness shall be the everlasting 

light. 

This old and always beautiful parable of na- 
ture is a fair analogy of man's life in the Spirit, 
except that to men are given powers of resistance. 
You and I fill no larger places in the universe 
than the rain-drops of yesterday's storm. We 
live a few days, and go out of sight ; but the divine 
Spirit of love, which in all the ages is as benefi- 
cent and personal as Jesus Christ was, finds us, 
draws us out of our loneliness up into compan- 
ionship with those whom he has made like him- 
self, keeps us near him until we become like him, 
and then sends us on our ministry to those who 
seem to have sunk into everlasting night. One 
finds a lonely spirit, and becomes a companion ; 
another finds a broken heart, and pours into it the 
oil of sympathy; another finds homeless children, 
and becomes their mother ; another finds a young 
man in danger of sin, and takes him by the hand 



66 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

and holds him until he is strong to resist ; anoth- 
er sees a great nation without knowledge of the 
Good Father, and hurries to it with the glad 
message ; another finds a lonely woman on the 
street ready to die, wraps around her the mantle 
of charity, takes her to her own home, and keeps 
her there until she has heart and courage to live. 
And so the work goes on, and those who by 
themselves were as insignificant as rain-drops on 
the ocean have become, no more useless and in- 
significant, but co-workers with the God of love 
— the Spirit of truth, for the hastening of the 
time when there shall be none to hurt or destroy 
in all God's holy mountain. 

My friends, this is your work, this is my work, 
this is what all may aid in doing if they will open 
their hearts to the Spirit of truth and love. 



IV. 

The Holy Spirit a Constant Factor 
IN THE Problem of Progress. 



'* Behind every drill which cuts the rock in the mountain tun- 
nel, behind every engine which drives the ship against storm and 
tempest over the riotous fury of waves, or which propels the 
loaded trains over alkali plains and rocky crests, is this invisible 
force of the spirit which since the new religion came has ex- 
pected a future to be wrought out by it, conformable to it, its 
ultimate crown of earthly glory." — R. S. Storrs, D.D. 

" The maxim of the whole book [the Bible] is that God is the 
educator of ... . every people; that all circumstances are his 
instruments; that all events are assertions of his presence; that 
whatever happens to men is a means of showing to them his 
righteousness, and of molding them to his image." — F. Do 
Maurice. 

" The hand that rounded Peter's donre, 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
Himself from God he could not free; 
He builded better than he knew; — 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

R. W. Emerson. 

*' Thou dost ever teach the wise, and freely on them pour 
The inspiration of Thy gifts, the gladness of Thy lore." 

St. Hildegarde. 



IV. 



The Holy Spirit a Constant Factor in 
THE Problem of Progress. 

*' And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." 

Gen. i. 2. 
" And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come." — Rev. xxii. 17. 

These texts are from the beginning and the 
end of the Bible. The first shows God moving upon 
the face of inanimate nature ; the second shows 
him calling his children at the end of all things. 
The first was before the earth had risen out of 
the waters or the stars been lighted in the firma- 
ment ; the second is a glimpse of that time in 
which the history of the earth shall have melted 
into the splendors and solemnities of eternity. 

The Holy Spirit did not first come after our 
Lord had died. He had been wath Abraham and 
Moses and David and Isaiah, as he was afterward 
with John and Paul and Luther and Wesley. 
He had even inspired certain heathen, as the 
Bible clearly shows in the story of Melchisedec 
and the prophecy of Balaam. The Psalms were 
from God as truly as the Gospels. Our Lord 
did not say that when he left the earth he would 
send one who had never been here before ; but 
he did say that when the visible Leader should 



^0 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

disappear, the invisible and spiritual Helper 
would carry on his work. 

God's plans and methods are as distinctly trace- 
able in the development of history as in the pro- 
cesses of nature or in the written Word. The 
** things which are made" clearly reveal God's 
method of operation ; the Apostle Paul goes 
further and says '' even his eternal power and 
divinity." In the gradual changes which have 
come over the earth from the periods of fire, of 
ice, of vegetation, of the appearance of animals, 
the student of nature finds sure evidence that 
the method of God is to move slowly, and out 
of imperfection and simple forms to bring splen- 
dor of completion and complexity of form. The 
world was not made as it is. It is not like a 
statue which an artist chisels, perfect at first ; it 
is rather like a tree which was only a single point 
of green, and now is a trunk with a hundred 
branches and ten thousand fragrant blossoms. 
This nature teaches : God plants germs, and lets 
them grow through centuries, but the process is 
ever toward finer form and larger life. The reve- 
lation of God in history teaches the same lesson. 
The earliest records are of men less perfect than 
those living to-day; first that which is natural, 
then that which is spiritual; first the savage, — 
passionate, sensual, earthly, — and then the same 
being gradually led by much training and terri- 
ble discipline toward higher life. The story of 
the Exodus epitomizes the world's history. 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OE PROGRESS, 7 1 

History is a growth rather than a mechanism. 
The problem of progress is the process by which 
humanity is sloughing off that which is merely 
animal and temporal, and rising towards that which 
is spiritual and eternal ; the Holy Spirit, a con- 
stant factor in that problem, is God always 
personally directing the process. 

These facts are explicitly taught in the Scrip- 
tures. The kingdom of God is to fill the earth. 
The kingdom of God is the goal of progress. 
Everything is moving toward a condition in 
which the spiritual, the real man, will be inde- 
pendent of that which is physical, sensual, sinful. 
Paul speaks of the whole creation in travail-pains, 
and the real redemption wall not be completed 
until the spiritual man is born, — released from the 
power of the animal. Believing that Christ has 
come to save individual sinners from the power 
and guilt of sin, — to free the spiritual nature 
from the control of the physical, — I find signs of 
the activity of God's Spirit where some see only 
genius or human sagacity. In all the progress of 
the ages the Spirit of God is moving upon the 
surface of humanity, as of old he moved upon 
the face of the waters. All life is under the 
touch of the Spirit, and all life is being lifted 
toward God. Limiting our inquiry for the pur- 
pose of definiteness, we observe that : 

The Holy Spirit is constantly present, reveal- 
ing and interpreting truth. Our Lord told his 
disciples that they could not understand all he 



T2 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

had said, and were not able to receive all he 
would like to teach; therefore he added : ^* How- 
beit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will 
guide you into all truth. . . . He shall take of 
mine and shall declare it unto you." That 
promise has been in process of fulfillment from 
that day to this. The disciples did not under- 
stand the Teacher ; they thought he was to be a 
Jewish Csesar. He planted in their hearts germs 
of truth which grew, but his earthly eyes did not 
see the harvest. The minds of men were filled 
with heathen religions and pagan philosophies. 
Heathenism was in the blood. Not easily are 
tendencies changed which have been growing 
through generations. The words of Christ fell 
on ears accustomed to phrases of rabbinical re- 
finement, of Roman law, of Stoic and Epicurean 
philosophy. Naturally and inevitably the Jews 
interpreted Jesus as if he wefe a Jew, and the 
Gentiles as if he were a Gentile. Christ was 
preached among Romans, and those who dwelt 
in the Empire dreamed of a new State with 
Christ as Emperor. The truth of Christ was 
forced into their rock-ribbed theory of a nation ; 
and as seeds growing in crevices sometimes 
split the rock, so it was impossible long to con- 
fine to the ideals of a single people that which 
v/as intended for the world. Yet, after a few 
centuries the Roman genius reasserted itself, 
and the Roman Church became only another 
form of the Roman State ; Christ seemed 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 73 

buried forever. But progress is by growth. The 
kingdom comes not with observation. The 
Spirit of God was at w^ork ; and in due time 
Luther arose, and the power of a corrupt 
hierarchy was broken. The theory of authority 
in religion, a relic of barbarism, received its death- 
blow. The fact that men are not judged by 
inexorable law, but that salvation is a free gift 
for all who believe in Christ and do their best to 
foUovv^ him, received its proper emphasis for the 
first time since Paul. It required more than a 
thousand years for the doctrine of justification 
by faith to be understood ; but the time came at 
last. 

After the Roman spell had been broken, a 
period of theological chaos intervened. Truth 
had to be re-stated and adjusted to a new envi- 
ronment. Calvin and Arminius appeared, one 
emphasizing the absolute will of God, and the 
other the free will of man. Each had truth, but 
neither was large enough to see the truth held 
by his brother. So the battle went on, but it 
was the kind of fight that the tree has with earth 
and storms : all the time the truth was growing. 
Jonathan Edwards was the successor of Calvin, 
and John Wesley of Arminius. Again two 
leaders had truth, but both had narrowness of 
vision. One emphasized divine sovereignty, and 
the other individual responsibility. Calvin and 
Arminius, Edwards and Wesley, did magnificent 
work; they were true apostles: they held, like 



74 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

torches, truth which the world needed. But the 
Spirit of God was not confined to them. In a 
thousand homes and ten thousand hearts, by the 
sweet and tender ministrations of fatherhood and 
motherhood, God was bringing men to reahze that, 
while his will was absolute and the will of man 
free, still, back of all theories and philosophies, 
one fact was throwing its radiance over the 
whole life of man, — that of the divine Fatherhood. 

Christ said that the whole duty of man could 
be condensed into the two commandments of 
love ; that God in eternity was revealed in him- 
self, in spirit, purpose, and method. He said that 
men did not understand it then, but that the 
Spirit would interpret it unto them. 

Has that promise been fulfilled? The race has 
been led to a spiritual interpretation of the teach- 
ing of Christ as fast as it was possible. Even 
now we have little more than a hint of the rich- 
ness and love and helpfulness of his teaching, 
simply because our poor, untrained, conceited, 
prejudiced minds are only partially open. But 
how constantly the truth has grown ! No more 
quibbling about whether the Spirit proceeded 
from the Father and the Son, or only from the 
Son ; no more inquisitions and burnings for those 
whose only crime is loyalty to conscience ; hardly 
any more interpretation of the words of the divine 
Christ as if he were a magnified Russian Tsar. 
Certain great truths at last are luminous, sub- 
lime : the saving act, faith, which is only another 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS, 75 

name for trust ; the one name for God used by 
Christ/^ Father ;" no great things to be done to 
win God's love ; the cross the symbol of everlast- 
ing love in voluntary sacrifice ; time, death, 
judgment, eternity, all in the hands of the Father, 
— under the guidance of the Spirit who never 
leaves, but daily leads to larger truth ! This is 
that to which the world has been led. Augus- 
tine was great and good, but when he died the 
Spirit did not cease moving on men. Luther, 
Calvin, Wesley, Edvv^ards, Maurice, Bushnell, were 
great and good, but the Spirit did not leave the 
world with them. And truth Vv^ill not come into 
its final expression in your words or mine. I 
wish I could live a thousand years and see my 
Master with the light and glory in which the 
Spirit will reveal him then ; and see humanity 
when the truth that God is the Father of all, and 
that men are brethren, has had a thousand years 
more to influence human thought and life. And 
yet such longings are unnecessary, for the Spirit 
has already taught us that death cannot touch 
eternal life, and that those who have come to 
know God, even so dimly as you and I, shall, 
perhaps sooner than we dream, see him as he is. 
Fatherhood and brotherhood, and between 
them One v/ho is at once Father and Brother, — 
to this the slow centuries have come, through 
struggle and midnight and storm and fire, and 
revolutions in which nations were obliterated, 
and massacres in which whole churches perished. 



^^ SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

The truth could not die ; it has grown, rent 
rocks of false philosophy and prejudice, risen out 
of martyrs' ashes and St. Bartholomew's massa- 
cres and Communistic carnivals of death. And 
still the Spirit is leading humanity onward and 
upward. In the progress of men in knowledge 
of truth — not ^^ sacred" truth only but ^^all truth'' 
— the Holy Spirit has been a constant factor; 
and is ; and will be. 

Progress in science and invention has been along 
lines which work for the general uplifting of hu- 
manity. Let us examine a few discoveries in 
their bearing on the spiritual progress of humanity. 

The invention of gunpowder seems at first to 
have been in the interest of bloodshed ; but was 
it ? Before that time, fighting had been hand to 
hand. The influence of war on the individual 
then was more degrading; for it requires more 
depravity to kill a man who can look into one's 
very eyes than to shoot at a distance with the 
knowledge that the bullet is likely to miss. The 
evil effect of war on the individual has probably 
been reduced one half by gunpowder. It was 
the first of a series of inventions, each more de- 
structive than the one before it, until to-day war 
is almost impossible because the agencies of 
death have become so perfect that nations do 
not care to submit their population to extinction 
by dynamite and nitro-glycerine. Other wars 
will come, but each year makes them more im- 
probable and more nearly impossible. I see no 



THE SPIRIT: PROBIEM OF PROGRESS, 77 

reason to doubt that this discovery was under 
the inspiration of God for the purpose of hasten- 
ing the time when war shall be no more. 

Was not the invention of printing a part of the 
divine plan for the conversion of the world ? The 
spread of Christianity w^as feeble and limited un- 
til that invention. Up to that time few people 
ever saw the Bible ; it existed only in monaster- 
ies and occasional churches. There was not an 
average of one Bible for ten thousand professing 
Christians. The profound spiritual movement 
which was to pervade races was impossible until 
the mind of man could be brought face to face 
with the truth of God, until the individual could 
take that word with him into his closet and pray 
over it. Christianity follows knowledge of the 
truth. Now Bibles are everywhere. Missiona- 
ries are comparatively few, but one missionary 
can distribute a million Testaments, and each 
will become a helper in his work. Modern mis- 
sions waited for the discovery of the printing- 
press. By that each man of power multiplies 
his influence a hundredfold. Not only Bibles, 
but truths which make epochs, unbind chains, 
make men discontented with bad conditions, and 
herald a better social order, — all depended upon 
the art of printing. The movement in society 
toward democracy and brotherhood waited for 
this invention. The rule of force was inevitable 
until, by reading, men learned that right was on 
the side of the many. No man ever lived more 



78 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

essential to the world's conversion or more indis- 
pensable to the advancement of civilization than 
he who, by the invention of the printing-press, 
gave to each great thought a million tongues. 
Shall we say that he who utters truths which live 
and ennoble forever is ^^ inspired," and that the 
man who makes it possible for the world to read 
those words is only a genius? Back of that ap- 
parently stupid Dutchman who seemed to stum- 
ble upon the greatest of inventions moved the 
Spirit of God. 

Hardly less important was the discovery of 
the power of steam. In Birmingham, England, 
is still preserved the room in which Watt made 
his experiments ; and everything in the room is 
just as he left it. Little did he dream of what 
he was doing. His invention opened the door 
into a new world. His hands have brought the 
islands and continents nearer together than the 
European States were before his time. His 
thought has winged vehicles which fly around 
the world with messages of love and of warning ; 
with the old Bible translated into a hundred lan- 
guages ; with the missionaries of commerce and 
the cross. Do you suppose that these were not 
all included in the divine plan ? Do you think 
that no one but that obscure mechanic had any- 
thing to do with a discovery which has caused 
the world to change front? Take these inven- 
tions, the printing-press and the steam-engine, 
and add to them the telegraph, and measure 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 79 

their power for blessing. Criminals find no hid- 
ing-place, for the press exposes them. " The 
universe is built of glass" because newspapers 
exist. The Bible is literally in all lands and lan- 
guages. Missionaries can go wherever they Vv^ll. 
Newspapers carry sermons where ministers can- 
not preach. The telegraph warns of storms and 
pestilence. Distant nations have grown to be so 
near together that sympathy has become reality. 
Beneath the Southern Cross and in the North- 
ern zones the same books are read, the same in- 
spirations thrill, the same high hopes attract ; 
and those who, if there had been only preachers 
to exhort, would still be as hostile as a thousand 
years ago, are now learning that all men are 
brethren, simply because they have come to 
know one another. Not even the writers of the 
Gospels were more directly under the guidance 
of the Spirit of God than were the inventors 
who have thus made possible and probable the 
day in which the brotherhood of man shall be a 
reality. Without them, it would have been 
practically impossible to obey our Lord's last 
command to go into all the world and preach 
the Gospel to every creature. 

One other discovery deserves mention here : 
that of anaesthetics. Jesus Christ spent a large 
part of his ministry in relieving pain. In the 
Apocalypse no glimpse of heaven is more sub- 
lime than ^' There shall be no pain there." 
Groans of sickness, agonies of bruised and aching 



8o SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

bodies, terrors of hospitals and battlefields, — who 
can measure them ? What a different world this 
was when there was nothing to alleviate pain ! 
What a gloomy world it would be if all agents 
to deaden suffering were to be taken away! 
Can you doubt that it was a part of the divine 
plan to store in nature antidotes to suffering, 
and a part of the ministry of the Spirit of God 
to lead certain men to discover the places in 
which they were w^aiting for service? Blessed 
ministry ! Broken limbs, aching heads, bleeding 
wounds, throbbing nerves, burning fevers, end- 
less nights, mocking days ! O, the horror of ex- 
istence for those who inherit tendencies to dis- 
ease for w^hich they are not responsible, with no 
draught or lotion to deaden the agony ! The 
discovery of anaesthetics was one of the greatest 
blessings which ever came to the human race. 

If now some one asks, '^ Why were these dis- 
coveries delayed so long ? Do you consider it a 
sign of the presence of the Spirit of God that 
they were withheld from hundreds of genera- 
tions ?" I have only one answer; it is this: 
Whether nature or history be studied, one fact is 
evident. All God's plans are accomplished by 
processes of growth. Why was there a glacial 
period to plow the earth with rivers of ice? Why 
was not the creation made perfect at once ? No 
one can answer. God's way was the way of 
growth ; and it was not in accordance with his 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 8 1 

plan that these discoveries should be made be- 
fore. The hour had not yet come. 

But it is asked, ^^ Why do you ascribe these 
things to the inspiration of the Spirit?" Because 
they are means by which the spiritual life is 
asserting its power over matter and the material 
forces. The invisible povrers are used to heat our 
houses, draw our carriages, speed our messages, 
and print our pictures. The force of mind is 
greater than matter; and precisely because all 
these inventions are showing the supremacy of 
spirit do I believe them to have been inspirations 
of the great Spirit — the fountain of all force. 
A still clearer reason is found in the fact that all 
these inventions have a vital relation to the 
salvation of the world. They help to advance 
the work which our Lord came to accomplish ; 
they make possible the preaching of the Gospel 
to all nations ; they are promoting brotherhood ; 
they alleviate pain ; they are lifting the thoughts 
of men to higher things. They are helpers of 
Jesus Christ in saving the world. 

For eighteen hundred years at least, the great 
movements of progress have been coincident 
with, if not dependent upon, great religious 
movements. The points of departure for all 
advancement during that period have been, by 
common consent, three. It is at least curious 
that those three are coincident with the three 
greatest religious crises of modern history. 

There may be no significance in it, but it is 



82 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

remarkable that the whole history of the world 
changes from the year that Jesus was born. The 
greatest nation of the world was at its culmina- 
tion. As never before, men were in conditions 
to welcome a new religion. The old religions 
wxre dead. Superstitions from the Orient were 
sought by those who hungered for God and 
could not find him. Augustus had tried in vain 
to revive the old State religion. Never before 
had there been a common language in which a 
religion could be preached ; but now Greek was 
the popular language of the world. Not until 
Rome built roads for her armies to the extremi- 
ties of her empire would it have been possible 
for missionaries to carry the Gospel far beyond 
the hills and valleys of Palestine. But just when 
the religions of the known world ceased to have 
power, just when a common language provided a 
vehicle for the Gospel, just when Roman high- 
ways m.ade its proclamation possible, then the 
Saviour was born and the new life of the world 
began. It may have been only a coincidence, 
but is it reasonable to think that the destinies of 
nations and ages hang on coincidences? Is it 
not more reasonable to see the fulfillment of a 
divine plan coming into the field of vision.^ 

The next fact is that the Reformation and the 
Revival of Learning were simultaneous. For hun- 
dreds of years the human mind had been in 
chains ; for hundreds of years reason and con- 
science had been fettered. The Greek and 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 83 

Roman classics were unknown. The Bible was 
a sealed book. Suddenly, and at the same time, 
the whole horizon was illuminated. The classics 
were dragged from their hidmg-places ; art re- 
ceived an im.petus which gave the world the most 
splendid masterpieces of the ages; and Luther, 
like a lion, dashed under his feet and destroyed 
the infamous claim of a corrupt church to rule 
men, body and soul. Martin Luther, Galileo, 
and Michael Angelo were very nearly contem- 
poraries. For centuries the rock had been ap- 
parently crushing the seed: suddenly it flew in 
pieces ; and the seed which had been growling in 
secret was the power which had broken it. 

All recognize in the Reformation a great 
spiritual movement, but all do not see that the 
Revival of Learning was equally an inspiration 
of the Spirit. And yet the Revival of Learning 
had as vital a relation to the spread of the Gos- 
pel as the Reformation. It set men to separat- 
ing the true from the false. The scientific spirit 
was born there ; the critical spirit was born there. 
Luther asserted the duty of men to interpret the 
Word of God for themselves under the guidance 
of the Spirit. The Revival of Learning trained 
men to think; it was the beginning of the era of 
intelligence and diffusion of knowledge, of the 
critical study not only of the classical authors 
but also of the Bible, which has grown into the 
critical method of the nineteenth century. When 
the Reformation had declared man*s indcpend- 



84 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

ence, when the Bible had been unbound, when 
the printing-press had been discovered, then the 
corresponding mental movement made it possible 
for men to read and interpret the Bible intelli- 
gently. The Renaissance and the Reformation 
are two names for one great historical movement 
in which the Spirit of God is distinctly seen in 
his office of continuing the divine work of the 
ages. 

Again, the settlement of the New World was 
coincident with the most remarkable spiritual 
movement since Luther. Each time the world 
is widened, the Spirit is seen going in to possess 
the land. The discovery of the New World fired 
ambition and cupidity in the Old. Adventurers 
were multiplied. Just at that time there was a 
class of people — intellectual and spiritual children 
of the Reformation and the Revival of Learning 
—who believed that God called them to do their 
own thinking and that he had trained them to 
think correctly, and who found no home in the 
land of their birth. They were of the stuff of 
which heroes are made. They feared God, but 
neither the elements nor man. Just when the 
New World was opened, these men — happened, 
shall we say? or w^ere inspired of God? to be 
looking for a land in which they could be loyal 
to reason and conscience. Hither they came. 
The foundations of the nation were laid by men 
who had heads, and who believed in thinking 
for themselves; who had consciences, and who 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 85 

believed that the voice of duty was God*s voice ; 
who had iron in their blood, and who were ready 
for great things if called from above to do them. 
It was the children of these men who fought in 
the Revolution ; who would allow no peace until 
slavery w^as abolished ; who prayed under the 
haystack at Williamstown and began modern 
missions ; w^ho have carried the open Bible and 
the common school from ocean to ocean. 

It may have been only a coincidence that Jesus 
Christ came just when the whole world was with- 
out a religion and yet had one language and one 
State ; it may have been only a coincidence that 
the Reformation and Revival of Learning ap- 
peared in history hand in hand — the one freeing 
the conscience and unbinding the Bible, the other 
training the mind to think ; it may have been 
only a coincidence that when the New World 
was discovered, just then there should have been 
a company of men like the Pilgrims, saturated 
with the Bible and willing to die for it, ready to 
go in and possess the land : but I see in these 
facts more than coincidences. I see the move- 
ment of that Spirit of God who our Lord said 
should carry on the divine work and should abide 
with his people forever. 

These three facts have been emphasized in this 
sermon : i. Christ said that the spirit would make 
plain his teachings ; and never were the teach- 
ings of Christ so well understood as in our day. 

2. Christ said : '' And I, if I be lifted up, will draw 



86 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

all men unto me/' In order that this might be 
fulfilled, barriers of distance and enmity and lan- 
guage have gone down ; the invention of gunpow- 
der has made wars less frequent and will eventu- 
ally make them impossible ; the printing-press 
furnishes a means by w^hich the Gospel may go 
to the ends of the earth ; the steam-engine makes 
it possible to carry the printed word ; while all 
these, with the discovery of anaesthetics and 
other elements of Christian civilization which we 
have not space to enumerate, have served to draw 
the nations together, to increase brotherhood, and 
to relieve pain. This is all in the line of Christ's 
working. The doing of these things makes it 
possible for him to draw all men unto himself. 

And, 3, we have seen that each advance in the 
world's civilization has been contemporaneous 
wath a new mianifestation of spiritual life, and 
that the civilizing process has been uniformly 
the vehicle for the manifestation of the spiritual 
purpose. 

These three facts show clearly that, as indi- 
vidual life is always under the influence of the 
Spirit of God, so the same Spirit is carrying out 
his purposes in the development of history. You 
and I will not live to see it ; but some time, 
probably — because of the continuance of this 
spiritual ministry — this earth of ours will be the 
abode of beings as much above those Vv^ho are 
living now as we are above those who dwelt in 
prehistoric times. Our master lived in daily recog- 



THE SPIRIT: PROBLEM OF PROGRESS. 8/ 

nition of and communion with the unseen and 
spiritual. His hfe is our true Hfe. In comiparison 
with that all earthly things are of little value ; be- 
side it the praise or condemnation of men is not to 
be considered. This is our hope, not that we are 
able to win that life, but that the one God — our 
Father, our Saviour, the Spirit who moves on 
our spirits — is drawing us upward, cutting one 
by one the bands which bind us to the earth, and 
filling us with that knowledge which is eternal 
life. 

The time is short. The day is at hand. Let 
us lay aside every weight; let us remember that 
only the pure in heart shall see God ; let us 
remember, also, that the promises concerning the 
Comforter were to those who had first accepted 
Christ as Saviour. 

Who is the Christian man? He who obeys 
the Master's voice when he says, "' Follov/ me,'* 
and who now, and throughout the ages of ages, 
submits himself to be led by the Spirit of Truth. 



V. 

Conditions of Spiritual Sight. 



" But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty — the divine 
beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not dogged with 
the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and vanities of 
human life — thither lo oking, and holding converse with the true 
beauty divine and simple, and bringing into being and educating 
true creations of virtue and not idols only ?" — Plato. 

" The invisible spiritual world is not merely invisible for us, 
but is altogether imperceptible by means of the senses.'' 

Richard Rothe. 

'' If people, instead of seeking joyful experiences for them- 
selves, would seek to make other people's experiences joyful ; 
instead of seeking to get rid of their own burdens, would seek to 
bear the burdens of others ; instead of examining whether they 
are in the true way, would seek to bring back to the fold of 
Christ those who have wandered from it, — they would find that 
doing good is the shortest road to being good." 

H. W. Beecher. 

** Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have 
known." — John Ruskin. 

'* O God, the pure alone, 

E'en in their deep confessing, 
Can see thee as their own. 
And find the perfect blessing." Anon. 



Conditions of Spiritual Sight. 

" Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." 

Matt. V. 8. 

This is one of the jewels of the New Testa- 
ment. It is the opal of the Beatitudes : '' Blessed 
are the poor in spirit;" ^^ Blessed are they that 
mourn ;" ^^ Blessed are the meek ;" '^ Blessed are 
they that do hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness;" '' Blessed are the merciful ;" '' Blessed are 
the pure in heart," — this is the crown and climax. 
Here such a sight of God as is possible on the 
earth is mentioned among the blessed things, and 
its condition defined. Let that word '' God " 
represent the whole sphere of spiritual truth. 
Then we may read the text, ^' Blessed are the 
pure in heart: for they shall see, or understand, 
spiritual things." Purity of heart is one of the 
conditions of spiritual sight. Our subject is 
suggested by this Beatitude, although our study 
will not be confined to it. 

What do we mean by spiritual sight ? It will 
be difficult to define our meaning with precision, 
so we will illustrate. You and I talk about God. 
We ask, Is there, be}'ond these radiant fields. 



92 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

starry skies, changing seasons, and dying mul- 
titudes of men, a Being who never changes and 
who can do all things according to his own 
will ? That question may be answered in two 
ways. Any man can gather evidences of the 
existence of God. He sees that all the leaves 
are curved : strawberry leaves, maple leaves, 
apple leaves are curved. They grow on round 
stems, from rounded trunks of trees which to- 
gether or in parts are variations of a circle. Noth- 
ing ever grows in squares or angles. Life always 
manifests itself in curves. From the dimple in a 
baby's cheek to the " Big Trees '' that for three 
thousand years have faced the tempests of the 
Sierras ; from the tiny bell of a lily-of-the-valley 
to the orbits of planets, comets, constellations, 
and galaxies, which in solemn silence sail in aerial 
seas, the line of beauty is the pathway of the 
universe. How happens it, but that everything 
comes from the One mind ? Or, take that old say- 
ing of the philosophers, Cogito, ergo sum, — '' I 
think, therefore I exist,'' — and carry it on as 
philosophers do, and ask, Can an impersonal 
force produce an intelligent being? In this way 
you inquire how it is that the eye is adapted to 
light, the lungs to air; how all faculties are sup- 
pHed with that which is necessary to the exercise 
of their functions. You are brought to the con- 
clusion that design implies a designer. This is 
simply an intellectual process. It may be 
pursued by a villain, if he knows enough, as well 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT. 93 

as by a saint ; the best head will gather the best 
facts : and, after all, minds will differ in results. 

But there is knowledge of God dijfferent from 
that which comes by the process of reason- 
ing. In a church of Hartford was an old 
colored wood-sawer. He knew no grammar ; he 
had never studied a book ; he could not even read. 
Yet, Dr. Bushnell says, when that old man opened 
his lips in prayer his language was worthy of 
Cicero. He believed in God as he believed in his 
ov/n existence. The pagan slave Epictetus says, 
'' If a person could be persuaded of this principle 
as he ought, that we are all originally descended 
from God, and that He is the Father of men and 
gods, I conceive he would never think of himself 
meanly or ignobly." That slave-philosopher, 
whose golden thoughts have been beaten out 
into a thousand modern books, had a clear con- 
ception of Deity, morality, and the relation 
between man and man. How did he get it? By 
study? No. In some strange way it was flashed 
in upon his mind. You may call it intuition, but 
intuition is too broad a word. Let us call it 
*' spiritual sight." By that we mean that there is 
a knowledge of God, of obligation, an under- 
standing of the claims of religous truth which is 
not and cannot be conveyed by study, and which 
comes only to those who are in a certain spiritual 
condition. This fact is based on the principle 
that only like can discern like. *^ When we are 
like him, we shall see him as he is." Onlv those 



94 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

who are like God can see God. One understands 
instantly the meaning of sacrifice. Another 
laughs at it. The second cannot be convinced by 
argument. The first acts, not because he has 
passed through an intellectual process, but 
because of a spontaneous conviction of duty. 
Every one can talk of God ; anyone can make 
an argument to prove or disprove His existence. 
Only those who are like him realize his presence 
and feel the force of his claims. 

What are the conditions of spiritual sight? 

The first is Purity of heart. The secret of 
religion is locked from those who are not white- 
hearted. You may fashion syllogisms never so 
deftly ; you may pack into industrious heads 
knowledge of all the sciences ; you may occupy 
any position of responsibility or honor ; still will 
you find written over the door of all spiritual 
attainment this variation of Plato's sentence : 
'' No man can enter here who is not pure in 
heart.'* Not the clear-headed, the strong-willed, 
or the widely-read, but the pure, shall see God 
and understand his truth. What did our Lord 
mean by this utterance? The men whom he 
addressed were careful to have their sacrifices 
" healthy, sound, and clean, and whole." To them 
he said, in effect, *^ You are careful about the 
animals you offer on the altars : be careful about 
your hearts." Ordinarily, purity means freedom 
from filth. Purity is in character what trans- 
parency is in the crystal. "' It is water flowing 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, 95 

unmixed and clear from the mountain spring. 
Or it is the white of snow. Or it is the clear open 
heaven through which the sparkling stars appear. 
Or it is the pure light itself in which they shine. 
A pure character is that in mind, and feeling, and 
spirit of life which all these clear untarnished 
symbols of nature image, in their lower and 
merely sensible sphere, to our outward eye." ^ 

" Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew 
a right spirit within me," is a prayer for the realiz- 
ation of this beatitude. 

Moral purity is an indispensable condition of 
spiritual sight. Sensuality dims the senses. It 
blackens the glass through which the soul should 
look to eternal realities. A mind filled with 
images of evil, through whose silent halls foul 
and bat-like imaginations fly to and fro, whose 
thought is not of the everlasting whiteness of 
God but of what will quickest feed the lusts, can 
no more understand spiritual things than a worm 
can understand the splendor of Dante's song. 
This is simple and plain. Every one knows what 
it is to have a white heart. There have been 
certain prominent men who have presumed to 
lead the world of thought, and to speak with 
authority concerning religious things, who should 
no more be trusted as guides than should blind 
men as pilots. This rules out of the category of 
religious teachers all such men as Goethe, and 

* Bushncll's " Sermons for the New Life," p. 264. 



96 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

that sweetest and saddest of singers, Robert 
Burns, and that strange combination of mind and 
imbecility whom the world knows as Voltaire. 
Goethe was a rou^. The warmest friends of 
Burns gladly draw a veil over the delinquencies 
of his moral life. Voltaire was one of the vilest 
as he was one of the ablest of mankind. "Too 
late I loved thee, O thou Beauty of Ancient 
Days,'' cried Augustine after an early life of sen- 
suality had blunted the fineness of his spiritual 
perceptions. " I would give ten years of my life 
if I could forget the pictures which a youth of 
wrongdoing has hung in memory," said one of 
our most eminent educators. Impurity grows in 
the mind which harbors it as rottenness grows 
in an apple. One such imagination is a seed 
from which a hundred fouler imaginations spring. 
There is no place for a high standard of thought 
or life in such a man. He may become nominally 
religious, he may develop a theological bias and 
make systems with ease, but he will never be 
spiritually sensitive. The impure cannot appre- 
ciate the delicacy of purity. There are lines in it 
which they never see. If they cannot appreciate 
purity in man, how can they enter into communion 
with the infinitely pure God? A man with dirt 
in his eyes cannot see the splendor of the stars; 
and it is equally impossible for him, with foulness 
in his heart, to see the radiant whiteness of God 
or of God's truth. 

Sincerity is a second condition of spiritual sight. 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, 9/ 

Without it there will be spiritual blindness. We 
are rocked in a sea of mystery, with darkness be- 
fore us, behind us, around us. What things are 
real? Beyond the blackness is there person- 
ality? Does death end all? How shall we walk 
without sight? These are terribly real questions 
facing every earnest man, and their answers are 
disclosed only to the sincere. Other things may 
be trifled with, but truth must be approached 
reverently and with honesty. If you and I ex- 
pect to be led by the Holy Spirit, we must cease 
to rely on human leadership. What will this 
man say? What will that council or assembly of 
ministers say? What will those persons on whom 
I am dependent for my daily bread say? These 
questions must be ignored by those who expect 
the guidance of God's Spirit. Without any 
recognition of the right of another to interpose 
his opinion, without regard to the authority of 
any name, however great, he who expects spiritual 
guidance must see to it that all foulness is kept 
from his mind, and that with perfect sincerity he 
seeks those things which are from above. It is 
difficult to be perfectly sincere. Other motives 
are clamorous. But the great ones whose souls 
have been opened to truth as the ocean surface 
to light, have always been those who have dared 
consequences and followed the inner illumination. 
In our churches, occasionally, much is done to 
prevent a man from being led by the Spirit. He 
is bound to a creedal statement which, in nine 



98 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

cases out of ten, no man, at the commencement 
of his Hfe, understands. 

We shall some time cease saying, Believe this, 
and believe that. We shall rather seek to keep 
men sensitive to the Spirit, as the glass in the 
camera is sensitive to the light, and then trust 
the Holy One to lead his own whithersoever he 
will. Sincerity, freedom from guile, independence 
of human opinions and motives — these must 
characterize those who w^ould have that deep 
conviction of the reality of God and the eternal 
life which holds a man with all the force of reality. 
I would rather die for an error which I believed 
to be true, as Giordano Bruno did, than to sit on 
a throne and profess what other men call truth, 
with my heart condemning my voice. 

The third condition of spiritual sight is Obedi- 
ence, This condition is announced by Christ in 
the words, ^* If any man will do His will, he shall 
know of the doctrine." It may be said this is 
begging the question. How can I obey One in 
whose existence I do not believe, or, at least, of 
which I am not certain? The question is fair, 
and yet our position is consistent. We assume 
nothing that all do not grant. Obedience. 
Obedience to what? To the light which each 
one has. Every one has some idea of what is 
right and what wTong. You may have no clear 
conception of God or the future life. Very well ! 
Stop thinking about those things. In what do 
you believe? That justice is right? Then seek 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT. 99 

to be absolutely just. That purity is right? 
Then strive so to live that your heart shall be like 
the driven snow. That it is right to be kind and 
faithful in domestic relations? Then live to that ; 
and if that is all the creed you have, at least be 
consistent with it. The only way to receive 
spiritual light is to commence by honoring the 
light already possessed. Perform the present 
duty. Emphasize the present belief. Better do 
wrong in trying to do right than to make no 
attempt. Carlyle says, ^^ Most true is it, as a wise 
man teaches us, that ' Doubt of any sort cannot 
be removed but by action.' On which ground, 
too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or 
uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the 
dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept 
well to heart, which to me w^as of invaluable ser- 
vice : ' Do the duty which lies nearest thee,' which 
thou knowest to be a duty! The second duty 
will already have become clearer." Obedience is 
the only Vv^ay by which many of the profoundest 
lessons can be learned. " Love your enemies, 
bless them which curse you," said the Master. 
Is the lesson learned when the words are com- 
mitted ? No, it is not learned until, following in 
the footsteps of the Master, you and I have put 
it into practice. ^^ Love your enemies." What 
does that mean? You cannot know so long as 
there is one person to whom you are unwilling to 
go as Christ comes to you. How am I to learn 
forgiveness? By forgiving those who have in- 



lOO SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

jured me. How am I to learn what the Atone- 
ment means? By studying the philosophy of it, 
and calling it ^^governmental," or ^^ expiatory,'' or 
"moral influence,*' or what not? No. To do 
that, and that only, is to know no more of the 
sublimity of its meaning than the child who dips 
her hand in the sea can know of the teeming life 
and measureless spaces of ocean depths. To un- 
derstand the meaning of Christ's sacrifice, we 
must sacrifice. I am willing to say that no man 
knows what the Atonement means until, in the 
likeness of Christ, he has given himself for those 
who have nothing to give in return. Go to the 
one person toward whom you have most reason 
to feel unkindly — a person who has lied about 
you, insulted you, betrayed you, and violated 
every claim upon your care and regard. To that 
person go, speak to him kindly, treat him as if he 
were your own brother, and keep on doing that 
until he is conquered or you are dead, and then 
you will know something of what the Atonement 
means. The Christian doctrine of sacrifice can 
be understood only by obedience to its demands. 
Obedience is essential to an understanding of 
spiritual truth, — nay, essential even to the recep- 
tion of it. 

Not far from the Rhine stands the grandest of 
modern temples. Massive walls, graceful pillars,] 
forests of arches which seem to have been caught ' 
from some primeval forest, hideous gargoyles, 
flying buttresses, windows red as blood and golden j 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, lOI 

as light, angel-choir, solemn nave, and lofty spires 
that seem to reach the sky, — a poem in stone, 
rises the cathedral of Cologne, beside that grand 
old river. But it is not so grand as the work of 
Pastor Fliedner in the humble little town of 
Kaiserswerth, almost within its shadows, where is 
one of those rare institutions which give faith in 
God and hope for man. A humble clergyman 
and wife, when their people could no longer sup- 
port them, went to England for help. There 
they met Elizabeth Fry and went with her into 
the English prisons. Their hearts were touched 
with the altar-coal which had fired her heart. 
They returned to Germany. Now mark the 
growth. They were young. They knew little 
of life and nothing of philosophy. They com- 
menced to do for the first who needed help. 
Two outcast women, released from prison, could 
find no home. They were taken by Pastor Flied- 
ner to his house. Obedience brought new revela- 
tions of the meaning of service. The sphere of 
activity grew, — until now their training-school for 
nurses, their mission-house, their orphan and in- 
sane asylums have become stars whose radiance 
meets around the world. Obedience is the con- 
dition of knowledge. Kindness, justice, purity, 
charity, are right always and everywhere. For 
one, I have no faith in the spiritual illumination 
of any man, though his head contain the brains 
of Bacon, or his place in the church be that of 
preacher or pope, who has not learned that he 



102 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

must be kind, pure, just, and charitable. If a 
man is not obedient to the knowledge which he 
has, he can never have trustworthy revelations 
of higher knowledge. If a bad man tells you he 
believes in God, you wish he would act it more 
and talk it less ; in short, you do not believe in 
knowledge not m^anifested in deeds. 

Another condition is Self-surrender. Spirit- 
ual sight concerns itself with things outside of 
us, most of them invisible to the physical sight. 
You cannot see the stars by looking at your 
hands. You cannot appreciate the beautiful in 
conduct or character by wondering whether the 
v/orld is giving you your dues. No one is less to 
be trusted in spiritual things than the egotist. 
He knows all there is to know already. He is 
receptive of nothing from heaven above or earth 
beneath. Centered in himself, how can he hold 
the windows of his soul open ? The selfish man, 
always more anxious to receive all that belongs 
to him and to gain all that he can than to be 
generous, never having a good word for others 
for fear that some one else will get more atten- 
tion than himself, always looking out for slights, 
and fancying them where they are never intended 
— such a man may have good qualities, but he 
can never receive special spiritual illumination. 
The generous soul is the open soul. Hence, 
while great leaders have usually been egotists, as 
Bacon in philosophy. Dr. Johnson in literature, 
and Napoleon in the movement of nations, the 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT. IO3 

great spiritual teachers have been self-forgetful. 
'' I have learned in whatsoever state I am, there- 
with to be content," cried the Apostle Paul. 
Sakya Muni, the Buddha, who has made the re- 
ligion for a third of the human race, left the 
splendor of a royal court, spent his days where he 
could feel the beating and the breaking of human 
hearts, gave himself to find a way of escape from 
the '' ever-changing wheel of nature and of pain." 
The Orient, w^hich has followed Buddha, has 
been led in a faith of purest morals by one who, 
though he never heard of Jesus, walked the same 
pathway of self-denying service for his fellow- 
men. And our great Master ! What words de- 
scribe him, the world's supreme moral Teacher 
and spiritual Instructor, like these : ^^ He made 
himself of no reputation ; and, being found in 
fashion as a man, he humbled himself and be- 
came obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross"? All who would receive light from God 
must follow in his footsteps. Man is but an 
atom in the universe, not its center. But the 
selfish man will make dogmatic statements about 
God and eternity, as if the Almighty were in the 
habit of consulting him concerning the manage- 
ment of the universe. He is not to be trusted. 
Close by his side, hardly daring to look up, is 
one who makes no pretensions, who realizes that 
an individual is to the universe less than a drop 
of water to the sea, but in whose quiet hours 
have come visions of truth, duty, and the possi- 



I04 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

bility of goodness of which the former never 
dreamed. To such God manifests himself. 

He may reveal truth to a man who knows 
nothing of books, as he did to Job ; to one who 
is no philosopher, as he did to the Apostle John ; 
but he never reveals spiritual things to those 
who are impure, insincere, careless of duty, or 
selfish. I do not underrate knowledge and cul- 
ture. A wise man who is pure in heart is better 
than if he were ignorant. But I want to record 
my belief that many who have no time for study, 
whose lives are lives of drudgery and pain, of 
whom the world never hears, have visions of God 
and the mystery of his service of which the 
masses are ignorant. 

Purity, sincerity, obedience, self-surrender, — 
these are the marble steps that lead to the spirit- 
ual temple. 

Three lessons naturally follow. 

If what has been said is true, then the best 
teacher of spiritual truth, other things being 
equal, is the purest and truest man. Even a man 
who seldom opens a book, if we can imagine him 
to be purer in heart than they, is a better guide 
for spiritual things than Jonathan Edwards with 
all his theology, Professor Huxley with all his 
scientific acumen, Neander with all his historic 
research, or Herbert Spencer with all- the powers 
of his philosophic mind. Not learning, but good- 
ness, is the world's best teacher. This is not the 
world's way of looking at it. Innocence is almost 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, 10$ 

synonymous with weakness. Queen Caroline 
with a diamond wrote on the window of her 
palace, ^^ Lord, make others great, keep me in- 
nocent/' The world's best teacher of its pro- 
foundest mysteries is the world's purest man. 
This is not the place to discuss the question of 
the relation of science and religion. It is enough 
to say that when Tyndall, Huxley, or Mivart 
speak of physical science, it is time for you and 
me to listen ; they are princes in their own 
realm. But I do want to emphasize the fact 
that because some one is learned in other things 
he is not therefore to be trusted as a religious 
guide. The scientist has no right to a feather's 
weight of influence in religion because he is a 
scientist. The Christian knows no more about 
the origin of the world, or the laws that govern 
it, because he is a Christian, than if he were 
not a Christian. The Beatitude needs angelic em- 
phasis : ^^ Blessed are the pure in heart : for they 
shall see God." Newton may instruct in science, 
Niebuhr in history, Hamilton in philosophy, 
Beethoven in music, Angelo in art, Calvin in the- 
ology ; but these things are not spiritual truth, 
and it is the pure in heart who see God and know 
spiritual truth. Tennyson's lines on the dwellers 
in the spirit-realm may be applied to such truths : 

" How pure at heart and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold, 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 

An hour's communion with the dead. 



I06 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

*' In vain shalt thou, or any, call 
The spirits from their golden day, 
Except like them thou too canst say, 

My spirit is at peace with all. 

** They haunt the silence of the breast, 

Imaginations calm and fair, 

The memory like a cloudless air. 
The conscience as a sea at rest : 

** But when the heart is full of din, 

And doubt beside the portal waits, 

They can but listen at the gates. 
And hear the household jar within. " 

There came to my study a few years ago a 
man without work and not able to work, with a 
large family of his own, and a blind father depend- 
ent on him. I asked him his name. He gave 
it. I asked him how to spell it. ** Well," said 
he, ** to be honest with you, I have never been to 
school a day in my life. I have always had to 
work early and late, and I don't know how to 
spell." It was no fault of his. Into such hearts 
comes longing for God as real as yours or mine. 
They bury their dead with tears as sincere as 
ours. The tremendous reality of the future they 
face with inquiry as eager as ours. It is not of 
the rich, the wise, the strong, the successful ; not 
of those who can say with Whittier, 

*' I listen to the Sybil's chant, 

The voice of priest and hierophant; 
I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, 
And what of life and what of death 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, lO/ 

" The demon taught to Socrates, 
And what, beneath his garden trees 
Slow-pacing with a dream-like tread, 
The solemn thoughted Plato said; . . ." 

nay, it is not written of any of these, but of the 
pure in heart, that They shall see God. There- 
fore the poorest, the weakest, the humblest man 
that walks the earth may enter into communion 
with the Deity. 

Professor Tyndall, after almost superhuman 
exertions, climbed the Matterhorn, and, standing 
upon the summit, where few have stood or ever 
will stand, his mind ran back to the beginning of 
creation, back to the star-dust out of which he 
imagines all things to have been evolved, and he 
asks, '* Did that formless fog contain, potentially, 
the sadness with which I regard the Matterhorn ? 
Does the thought which now runs back to it 
simply return to its primeval home? Such are 
the questions, without replies, which run through 
consciousness during a ten minutes* halt upon 
the weathered spire of the Matterhorn." Ques- 
tions equally mysterious meet us everywhere. 
We live, as birds and beasts and insects live, 
— to die. We put our thoughts into build- 
ings, books, machines ; and the buildings stand, 
the books are read, the machines run on, when 
we are formless dust. We reach eternity with 
aspiration, and grasp only the facts of an hour. 
O my friends, let us be honest with ourselves ! 
Let us covet the best gifts. Let us not shut 



I08 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

our eyes to facts, even though we understand 
them not. We walk between graves. Stars 
shine on when men are gone. We love, and 
lovers chains are broken as rudely as any others. 
We are made for happiness ; and yet Augustine^s 
words are true, '^ God hath had one Son without 
sin, but never one without sorrow.'* Every heart 
sometimes drops blood ; and when we ask. Does 
no one see ? Can no one help ? — the waters rip- 
ple, the stars shine, the trees whisper, the great 
world *'' spins down the grooves of change,'' and 
no answer comes from any of them. Who can 
know anything of what every one longs to 
know? Only to those who are pure, sincere, 
obedient to the light they have, unselfish, comes 
the divine voice of the Divine Teacher. Then 
how may we become pure, sincere, obedient, un- 
selfish ? Almost in a word can we answer : Be- 
come a disciple of the only pure One who ever 
walked this earth. 

Spirit inspires spirit. Would you become brave ? 
Read Plutarch, and the dauntless heroism of 
those warriors of the elder ages will fire your 
soul with their fervor. Would you be a philan- 
thropist? Study the splendid self-sacrifice of 
Howard and Pastor Harms ; fall in love with 
Florence Nightingale treading the ghastly wards 
at Scutari, while bleeding soldiers kiss her shad- 
ow as if an angel had passed : their example will 
become your inspiration. Would you be pure 
in heart, sincere as light, obedient and self-sac- 



CONDITIONS OF SPIRITUAL SIGHT, IO9 

rificing? Then study the words, imitate the 
example, fall in love with the person, and spend 
all the time you possibly can in the presence, of 
Him who is the Brightness of the Father's glory ; 
and as roses and violets absorb their colors from 
the sun, so you will become white with the radi- 
ance of Christ's purity, and in his light the mys- 
teries of earth shall melt into the changeless 
realities of the Better Land. 



VI. 

The Theological Thought of our 
Time. 



" The theologian must be guided by the same rules in the col- 
lection of facts as govern the man of science. . . . An imper- 
fect induction of facts led men for ages to believe that the sun 
moved round the earth, and that the earth was an extended 
plain. In theology, a partial induction of particulars has led to 
like serious errors." — Charles Hodge, D.D. 

" Truth will always seem deeper, broader, higher, the nearer 
we approach it; the more we converse with the eternal, the less 
we dream of comprehending it." — F. D. Maurice. 

" Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect 
He could not, what he knows now, know at first; 
What he considers that he knows to-day, 
Come but to-morrow he will find misknown; 
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns 
Because he lives, which is to be a man." 

Robert Browning. 

* ' Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the 
suns." Tennsyon. 



VI. 

The Theological Thought of our Time. 

*' Watchman, what of the night?" — Isaiah xxi. ii. 

Our age bristles with interrogation-points. 
That is a good sign. Where there is no anxiety 
about beUef there is httle care about life. Inquiry 
is the first step toward faith. Never before was 
there so large a proportion of undaunted searchers 
for truth. Their eyes are open. There are no omi- 
nous clouds in the whole horizon of thought, and 
yet many fear that the foundations of religion 
are being undermined and that the world is fast 
swinging toward skepticism. The apprehen- 
sion results from confusing inquiry with doubt. 
Recognizing the essential connection between 
theory and character, we will consider some of the 
conclusions reached in recent years through reve- 
rent study of the problems of religion. Our pur- 
pose is not controversial. Simply and impartially 
let us seek to answer the question of the text : 

What of the night?" 

Each age will have its own solution of the 
eternal problems and its own interpretation of 



114 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

the eternal truth. No one can any more think 
for another than he can breathe for another. 
Each individual decides duty and destiny for him- 
self. Each is compelled to stand on his own feet 
and to think with his own brain. The thought 
and expression of one age are never identical with 
those of a preceding age. The thought of an 
age will be composed of the diverse and divergent 
thoughts of its individual members. It will have 
in it something peculiar to each. Forms of ex- 
pression and theories about the contents of relig- 
ion are, therefore, variable. It is so in all spheres 
of investigation. Truth does not change ; the 
facts on which religion rests are im.mutable : but 
the point of observation is never twice the same. 
Astronomy has been many times rewritten. One 
astronomer will tell you that the heat of the sun 
is caused by concussion of meteoric bodies falling 
on its surface, and another, that it is caused by 
the shrinking of the sun*s mass. Once the sun 
was supposed to move around the earth, and 
again, the earth was supposed to be flat. Books 
which point to the Pleiades as the central con- 
stellation of the universe and to the star Alcyone 
as the center of that constellation, are not yet 
obsolete ; but modern astronomy declares to be 
fancy the theory of a central sun around which 
the whole creation swings. Stars and suns are 
not affected by theories concerning them : and 
no more are the facts of religion, — such as sin, 
salvation, God, and eternity, — affected by at 



J 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 115 

tempts of individuals to bring them within the 
field of their spiritual telescopes. 

No age can formulate its thought in what shall 
be a formula for all ages. Men w^ho lived one 
hundred or five hundred years ago were limited 
like ourselves. They faced the same mysteries 
and studied the same revelations. Each gener- 
ation will think according to the peculiarities of 
its general life. It will differ from other ages in 
its statement of religious truth as it differs from 
them in its interpretation of scientific or philo- 
sophical truth. God has given a revelation of 
his nature and of his Avill. About that revela- 
tion, in the man Christ Jesus and in the words 
of the Bible, there have been differences from the 
first and there will be to the end. Different 
minds see different things everywhere. There is 
a spiritual as w^ell as a physical color-blindness. 
Heredity determines the mental bias. Men usu- 
ally see as they were born to see. One finds 
nothing but doctrine in the Bible : he lives on 
the first eight chapters of Romans ; apparently 
he never thinks of the Sermon on the Mount 
or the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. 
Another is impressed by the stern and lofty 
ethical standard of the Bible : he never lingers 
over the fifth of Romans or the first chapters of 
Ephesians, and declares that Paul spends double 
the time in teaching morality that he does in 
stating doctrine. Some think they cannot under- 
stand a word of the Bible except through cate- 



Il6 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

chism glasses. What shall we say? That the 
Bible can be made to mean anything, and there- 
fore means nothing? Is not the truer conclusion 
this : that no individual is large enough to see 
all that there is in the Bible, any more than all 
there is in nature ? What each sees is true, and 
yet the truth itself is greater than a thousand 
million fractions of humanity, who always em- 
phasize that which harmonizes with their nature 
and their prejudices. The Bible has been studied 
for hundreds of years. Criticism has grown to a 
science. Interpretation has become the life-work 
of consecrated scholars. We look to other days 
and long for vanished wisdom and piety. Dis- 
tance lends enchantment to the view in this 
sphere as in all others. Men appear larger- 
brained and more spiritual as they grow distant. 
Probably the members of the Evangelical Alli- 
ance of 1873 surpassed, for ability, scholarship, 
and charity, any council of the early church. 
These two considerations — (i) that each age, in 
all spheres, seeks to express facts according to its 
own knowledge and ways of thinking, and (2) 
that revelation is something which demands 
study and can be understood only as the result 
of a process of thought by persons of different 
capacities and prejudice — show that the relig- 
ious outlook is never so discouraging as when 
there is no interest manifest in the consideration 
of the fundamental problems of religion, which 
are always the fundamental problems of life. 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 117 

I have thus spoken by way of preface to an 
enumeration of certain conclusions of religious 
thought in our time. Emphasis has been put on 
these facts because the process of re-adjustment 
which is going on in all churches and in almost 
all thoughtful minds, by which the thought and 
knowledge of the nineteenth century is seeking 
to harmonize discovered reality wath revealed 
truth, is a sign of spiritual vitality rather than of 
the decadence of Christianity. It means what 
the reformation under Luther meant ; what the 
reformation under Calvin meant ; what the trial 
of Jonathan Edwards for heresy meant, — namely, 
that men are busy now, as they always have been 
and always will be, in trjang to harmonize the 
truth of revelation w^ith the facts of life and the 
moral intuitions, so that there shall be no conflict 
between God in the human soul and God in the 
written word. 

The most conspicuous fact in current relig- 
ious thought is the supremacy of Jesus Christ. 
The center of the religious thought of fifty years 
ago in New England was the divine decrees. 
Until recently the emphasis was placed on the 
sovereignty of God rather than on the revelation 
of God in Christ. The question as to which was 
right and which wrong cannot be decided by a 
show of hands. It is enough to know that both 
are truths of importance. Now, as never before, 
Christian thought centers in the person and work 
of our Lord. All stud}' about God, man, and 



Il8 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

eternity must begin and end in Jesus Christ. 
There are few writers of any standing in theo- 
logical circles who do not insist that the very 
heart of their systems is: '' He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father also/' Jesus Christ, the 
personal self-revelation of God ; Jesus Christ, the 
revelation, in terms of humanity, of the ever- 
lasting Father; Jesus Christ, the One by whom 
all claims to revelation are to be tested; Jesus 
Christ, the soul and center of Christianity in his 
work as Teacher, as Example, and as Sacrifice, — 
this is the luminous and growing characteristic of 
religious thought. Philosophies about Christ are 
losing ground. Practical humanity clutches facts 
and throws theories overboard. Men realize 
their own impotence and their guilt. Earth's wails 
and agonies are never hushed. The only voice 
which has ever spoken peace to this raging sea is 
that of the Man of the New Testament. Slowly 
but surely the world has come to see that what it 
needs is some One to forgive its sins, to inspire it 
with hope, to relieve its misery, to touch its dead 
bodies with life. The One who has done this is 
being accepted as never before. Without invid- 
ious reflection it can be affirmed that the Uni- 
tarian movement is not spreading. It has in- 
fluenced contemporary thought immeasurably ; 
but its noblest leaders are becoming more and 
more evidently devoted to Christ. At a recent j 
meeting of the Summer School of Christian 
Philosophy the venerable Dr. Peabody, of Cam- 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, II9 

bridge, spoke most touchingly of our Lord as 
"' the God-man." The wonderful chaplet has not 
yet faded which William H. Channing, in a letter 
to Mr. Frothingham, of New York, laid at the 
foot of the cross after having searched the arid 
deserts of speculation in vain for something to 
satisfy his soul. These are the words of his con- 
fession: ''Once again I sought comfort with the 
blessed company of sages and saints of the Orient 
and Hellas — Vvdth Lao-Tszee and Kung-Fu-Tszee ; 
with the writers of the Bhagava-Geeta ^nd the 
Dhamma-Bada ; of the hymns of ancient Avesta 
and the modern sayings and songs of the Sufis ; 
with radiant Plato and heroic Epictetus, etc., <etc. 
Once more they refreshed and re-inspirited me as 
of old. But they did something better. Hand 
in hand they brought me up to the white marble 
steps, and the crystal baptismal font, and the 
bread and wine-crowned communion table — ay! 
to the cross in the chancel of the Christian tem- 
ple — and, as they laid their hands in benediction 
on my head, they whispered : ' Here is your real 
home. We have been but your guides in the 
desert to lead you to fellowship with the Father 
and the Son in the spirit of holy humanity. 
Peace be with you.' And so, my brother, once 
again, and with a purer, profounder, and tenderer 
love than ever, like a little child, I kissed the 
blood-stained feet and hands and sides of the 
hero of Calvary, and laid my head on the knees 
of the gentlest of martyrs, and was uplifted by 



I20 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

the embracing arms of the gracious Elder Brother, 
and in the kiss of mingled pity and pardon 
found the peace I sought, and became a Christian 
in experience^ as through a long life I had hoped 
and prayed to be. Depend upon it, dear Froth- 
ingham, there is on this small earth-ball no reality 
more real than this central communion with God 
in Christ, of which the saints of all ages in the 
church universal bear witness." The writer of 
these wonderful words is a type of the religious 
thought of our time. It is not swinging away 
from Christ ; it is centering in him. He is the 
inspiration of charity and philanthropy. His 
simple utterances are already the watchwords of 
hastening revolutions. Even writers like Henry 
George acknowledge that their discoveries in polit- 
tical economy are only getting back to the sim- 
plicity of the Teacher of Nazareth. Renan closes 
his Life of Christ with words in which are blended 
the music of poetry and the judgment of history. 
*' But whatever may be the surprises of the future, 
Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will 
grow young without ceasing ; his legend will call 
forth tears without end ; his sufferings will melt 
the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that 
among the sons of men there is none born greater 
than Jesus." 

In theology, in literature, in the newspapers, 
and, most of all, in the great missionary and 
charitable movements which glorify this century, 
are seen the pre-eminence of Christ. Infidelity 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT. 121 

attacks the Bible and the Church, but bows with 
uncovered head before our Master. It acknowl- 
edges that, more than any teacher who has ever 
lived, he has helped humanity in its movement 
toward divinity. The whole religious world 
unites in confessing its faith in these words : 

* * O Lord and Master of us all ! 
Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own thy sway, we hear thy call, 
We test our lives by thine." 

The second conclusion of religious thought in 
our time is that God is to be interpreted by his 
Fatherhood. I will illustrate my meaning. 
There have been, among others, three ways of 
thinking about God. He has been considered a 
lofty and glorious King. Passages of Scripture 
speaking of the grandeur and majesty of the 
Deity have been emphasized. In religion, every- 
thing is colored by the conception of God. 
When the kingly idea was most prominent, God 
was regarded as kings have been. Great, glori- 
ous, awful, to be approached only on bended 
knee ; doing his own will without care for the puny 
creatures beneath him. But when this concep- 
tion prevailed, human life was dismal and hope- 
kss, and it was hard to preach from such texts 
as : '^ Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy-laden." Interpret God and his relations 
to humanity by his majesty and you have a re^ 
licrion of awe and dread, — a faith which will com^ 



122 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

pel humility but will stimulate neither aspiration 
nor love. 

Another way of thinking of him has been as 
the Head of a government analogous to human 
government. What follows? A governor can 
have no heart. He must be holy and just. Ev- 
ery law must be impartially executed. If he has 
any sympathy with offenders, he must not show 
it. Art has pictured justice as a blind figure 
holding balances. So God has been represented: 
unable to see, and consequently without danger 
of favoritism ; simple, exact, inexorable, meting 
reward and penalty according to the demands of 
government. This is correct as far as it goes, 
but it is a partial representation. Everything is 
arranged with a view to the greatest good of the 
greatest number. But the idea of God as that 
of a Supreme Governor — how cold and distant 
and official ! Preach only this, and who will 
believe that " the bruised reed he will not break '? 
Go through the world with this message : That 
God is a Governor; that he considers not the 
happiness of individuals ; that his first anxiety is 
that all the wheels of government move smooth- 
ly, that the good be protected from the bad. 
What then ? There will be a conception which 
Tiay compel obedience but which will awaken no 
enthusiasm and attract no love. Think of God 
as a lofty and glorious King, interpreting him by 
his kingliness, and the next thought will be, — if, 
as the heavens are higher than the earth, he is 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT. 1 23 

more lofty, more unapproachable, than an earthly 
king, then what does he care for me ? Prayer 
will lose its delights, communion will become 
only form, and the universe will be a palace il- 
luminated with suns and systems, but not a home. 

One age has thought of God as King, an- 
other as moral Governor, but the characteristic 
of this age is that God is being interpreted by 
his Fatherhood. ^^ Our Father Vv'hich art in 
heaven " is the first prayer of childhood and the 
last prayer of the departing spirit. This age starts 
with that word ^^ Father " as a torch, and carries 
it into all the dark places of life and speculation. 
It says to the theologians : Logic is good and 
consistency desirable, but we will believe no doc- 
trine and tolerate no theories which contradict 
the Fatherhood of God. Your doctrine of the 
Atonement must recognize that the One to be 
propitiated is the Father of all, rather than King 
or Governor. Your doctrine of human responsi- 
bility must recognize that the frailties of our 
humanity and our inheritances of evil do not add 
condemnation. Your doctrine of punishment, 
in this world and in all worlds, must tolerate 
no picture of an angry God holding his child 
over infernal flames. In our Father's house 
there may be punishment and it may be last- 
ing, but it can never be vengeful, nor cruel, nor 
arbitrary. 

In literature and philosophy, pessimism is al- 
ways found where faith in the Fatherhood of God 



124 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

IS wanting. Perhaps the sublimest utterance of 
Stoicism is this from Epictetus : ^^ Who, then, is 
unconquerable? He whom the inevitable can- 
not overcome/' But how hopeless it is! Man 
is like a rock in a tempest, that is all. " The 
Light of Asia '' presents in form of exquisite 
music the saddest, dreariest philosophy that ever 
assumed the garb of religion. Almost its first 
note is this: "And life is woe.'' What is the 
end of the book ? " The dew-drop slips into the 
shining sea " : he is happiest who ceases to exist. 
There is a school of modern writers reaching 
back to Byron and Shelley, and including George 
Eliot, William Morris, Rossetti, and such philoso- 
phers as Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, whose 
philosophy of life might almost be condensed as 
follows: "Life is not worth living. Love and 
death are the only realities." George Eliot's 
characters seem to live in a universe of wheels 
within wheels in which the grist is the bodies 
and souls of men ; and remorselessly and forever 
they roll. In her pages the cold philosophy of 
Huxley finds literary expression : " Nature never 
overlooks a mistake nor makes the slightest al- 
lowance for ignorance." The contrast between 
George Eliot and Mrs. Browning is like that 
between night and day. There is no hope for 
those who know no Fatherhood. Do not these 
words of "Shakespeare's daughter" belong 
among the inspired utterances of humanity ? 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 12^ 

"And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our 
incompleteness, — 

'Round our restlessness, his rest." 

Interpret God by his Fatherhood. The uni- 
verse is in the leashes of love. ^^ The crowds with 
broken hearts, silent griefs, and agonies unutter- 
able — is there nothing better for them?" He 
bears our griefs and carries our sorrows. ^^ Those 
masses of little children packed in tenements in 
hot midsummer weather, how can they live de- 
cently? Is not something wrong?'* Not a hair 
of their heads can fall to the ground without the 
Father. "' But so many are sick ; there is such 
terrible pain; some are never well." Yes! and 
underneath all are the Everlasting Arms. *^ But, 
O, if it were not for death ! These terrible sep- 
arations ! And then, do you know that a great 
part of the world die from no disease but broken 
hearts?" Yes, but in our Father's house are 
many mansions. 

*' I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

This age, as no previous one, interprets God 
by his Fatherhood. 

Naturally, from the foregoing follows the fact 
that ideas concerning the nature of penalty are 
not the same as they have been in other periods 
of history. There is a distinction between the 
nature and the duration of penalty. At this 



126 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

time we pass current discussion on the doctrine 
of the duration of punishment, only calling atten- 
tion to the fact that it is the subject of serious 
and reverent inquiry in all evangelical denomina- J 
tions. To refuse to recognize that the whole ^ 
doctrine of life after death is being re-examined, 
and with more care than ever before, is to ignore 
that which is self-evident. 

This age does not think as many other ages 
have thought concerning the nature of penalty. 
It will be better to illustrate. Is punishment of 
sin natural, or arbitrary? Is it self-inflicting, or 
is it inflicted by the direct action of the Al- 
mighty? Suppose a man has a field of corn 
which he divides into two parts. One part he 
gives to one boy for cultivation, and the other to 
another. To the first he says : ^' You must keep 
steadily at work; if you do not, I shall whip 
you.'* The boy works faithfully for a while, but 
by and by grows careless, cuts the corn, and 
spoils the crop. The farmer calls him, shows him 
what he has done, and whips him. This is arbi- 
trary punishment. Does it do any good ? That 
depends on the boy. To the other he says: 
*^ You shall have the field to cultivate ; all that 
you raise shall be yours. You are old enough to 
take care of yourself. If you cultivate this field 
properly, you will have a good living. Under- 
stand that the responsibility is yours. If you 
do well, you will have enough ; if you neglect 
things, you will go hungry. You must take the 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 1 27 

consequences." The boy does neglect, and reaps 
no harvest because he Vv^as idle when he should 
have worked. After a while he comes to the 
farmer and says : ^^ I am hungrj/." The reply is: 
''Did you not have a chance to earn a living?" 
''Yes." "Why didn't you?" " I— I— didn't 
work." "Yes — and now you must go hungry." 
This illustrates the natural penalty of sin. It is 
as much the ordering of God as the other, but it 
is self-inflicting, " Whatsoever a man soweth, 
that shall he also reap." Science has immensely 
enlarged the boundaries of our thought. What 
is science? The study of God's methods of op- 
eration. It makes fearfully true that cry of the 
Psalmist : " Whither shall I flee from thy pres- 
ence?" God is in nature; he is in life; he is in 
what we call laws ; he has arranged things so that 
wrong-doing is always followed by misery. Em- 
erson says: "There is no den in the wade world 
in which to hide a rogue." Violation of law, 
which is sin, is followed by suffering ; and viola- 
tion of one law is as truly sin as violation of an- 
other, — violation of a law of the body is as truly 
sin as swearing or stealing. Both laws are from 
God. How universal is the fact of retribution ! 
How has it been so long neglected? Over-eat- 
ing causes indigestion : — sin followed by its pen- 
alty. The man yielding to passion becomes 
more passionate and disagreeable : — sin followed 
by its penalty. A lie ; and no one trusts the 
liar: — sin followed by its penalty. A lecherous 



128 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

private life clean on the outside, resulting in a 
mind fit for swine to revel in, full of all unclean- 
ness: — sin followed by its penalty. A man neg- 
lects the plumbing of his house and dies of 
diphtheria: — sin followed by its penalty. No one 
escapes. Nature is rigorous, she cannot be 
cheated. Rob her of sleep, and she will set your 
nerves quivering and stamp deep lines on your 
face. 

When we come to the doctrine of future pun- 
ishment it is evident that God condemns no one 
in any arbitrary sense. This is the plan of the 
universe. Any man may choose evil, if he will, 
as the prodigal took his goods and went into a 
far country. If he chooses to live with thieves 
and harlots forever, in spite of the entreaties of 
friends and the ministries of home, whose hand 
shuts the door, his Father's or his own ? Penalty 
self-inflicting ; no one able to escape it except by 
the grace of God in Jesus Christ ; the law, ^^What- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,'* 
running through the universe, — this is one of the 
conclusions which the Christian church of this 
age may be said to have reached, as the age of 
Athanasius formulated the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity. 

A further characteristic of the religious thought 
of our time is a return to the doctrine of Christ 
that his Spirit is to abide in his disciples, leading 
them into all truth. St. John wrote to his disci- 
ples : ^' Ye have an unction from the Holy One 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 1 29 

and need not that any man should teach you/' 
This was the final doctrine of our Lord. *^ I go 
away, but He who shall come after me shall 
abide with you." Into hearts pure, obedient, and 
loving God himself comes ; and humble men — 
fishermen and mechanics ; humble women ; 
housekeepers busy with work ; mothers burdened 
with responsibility — have become angels of God. 
A tent-maker became the leader of the world's 
thought. A frail woman went to the Crimea as 
nurse, and, single-handed, changed the hospital 
systems of the whole world. '' I am going away, 
but I will come again," said our Lord, '' in the 
Spirit whom I will send." Slowly the church is 
advancing toward appreciation of that sublime 
teaching. Each follower of Jesus becomes a 
temple of the Holy Ghost. In some mysterious 
way God lives, by his Spirit, in the spirits of 
those who give him entrance. Here we catch 
sight of a truth ineffably glorious. There is dan- 
ger of deception and arrogance, of mistaking 
egotism for spirituality; but our Lord's words 
were to his disciples, and more and more the 
world is coming to realize that power to uplift, 
power to discern truth, power to inspire holy en- 
thusiasm, is in proportion to the fullness with 
which is grasped the fact that every Christian 
heart is a temple at whose altar and in whose 
pulpit the Spirit of God forever abides. This is 
the doctrine which, more than any other, is 
changing the thought of our century. It puts 



130 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

terrible solemnity into the fact of responsibility, 
saying to all : '' If you are not led by the Spirit 
of God, it is because you are so selfish and im- 
pure that the Spirit cannot dwell in you/* 

It has seemed best thus to speak of the relig- 
ious thought of our time because thought 
touches life at every point. '* As a man thinketh 
in his heart, so is he." Our study has been of 
the characteristics of Christian thought ; with 
theories of doubt we have had nothing to do, 
speaking only of positive things. On the w^hole 
the outlook is encouraging. Standards of life 
are everywhere rising ; everywhere there is dis- 
content wath error and oppression. Socialism 
and Nihilism are only exaggerations of a legiti- 
mate demand for liberty and justice. Infidelity 
is neither so aggressive nor insidious as a century 
ago. The thing to be most dreaded is intellec- 
tual stagnation, absorption of thought in business 
and pleasure. It will be bad for the world when 
men cease to inquire concerning the fundamentals 
of the Christian faith ; for then, unless all are 
perfect, they will cease to care for truth. Jesus 
Christ leads the world's religious thought : God 
is interrupted by his Fatherhood : suffering is 
seen to follow wrong -doing everywhere: and 
men are beginning to realize that even the hum- 
blest may become temples of the God of eter- 
nity. 

These interpretations of truth are, probably, 
not final. The next generation will read Provi- 



THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT. 13 1 

dence and the Bible in its own light. We find 
no truth which conflicts with the facts our fathers 
studied. Let us expect that those who come 
after us will think and formulate for themselves; 
only let us not forget that God and human need 
never change, and that, until redemption is com- 
plete, human bodies w^eary with work, human 
hearts broken with grief and burdened with guilt 
will not cease to find the music of these words 
the sweetest sounds in the chaos and confusion 
of earth : '^ Come unto me, all ye that labor and 
are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest/* 



VII. 

The Incarnation. 



** We must either live without religion, without God, and 
without hope in the world, or receive the mystery of the In- 
carnation. . . . Without incarnation, a religion is impossible." 
— Alexander Vinet. 

* ' The idea of the perfect religion requires that of divine In- 
carnation, this being the consummation of revelation and hu= 
manity. The world is created for perfection. In the God-man 
this is given. Therefore is the God-man destined for the world 
by God's love, and through Him the perfect religion becomes 
reality." — Dr. I. A. Dorner. 

** Should His coming be delayed awhile, .... 
See if, for every finger of thy hands, 
There be not found, that day the world shall end, 
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word 
That he will grow incorporate with all, ... . 
Can a mere man do this ? 
Yet Christ saith, this he lived and died to do. 
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, 
Or lost !" Robert Browning. 



VIL 

The Incarnation. 

*' God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." 

2 Co?\ V. 19. 

The doctrine of God is an endless study. It 
is fundamental, and yet it is impossible to dog- 
matize about it Avithout presumption and imper- 
tinence. The subject is so vast that men may 
seem to hold views nearly antagonistic, which yet 
are only opposite sides of the same measureless 
truth. Yet it is more practical than the Golden 
Rule or than the Ten Commandments, for it 
gives them both their sanction. Character is al- 
ways the reflex of the idea of God. Nobility, 
purity, and moral earnestness attend high and 
spiritual conceptions of the Deity : sensuality, 
selfishness, and fatalism walk hand in hand with 
unworthy thoughts of him. 

These two apparently contradictory facts face 
us in our inquiry into this mysterious theme : 
(i) The doctrine is the most important about 
which men can think ; on their ideas of God de- 
pend all their theories of life, duty, and motive 
for work: and yet (2), it is a subject that can 
never be understood and about which only the 



136 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

most indefinite ideas can be formulated. But 
these facts contradict each other only in appear- 
ance. The Scripture says that ^^ clouds and dark- 
ness are round about Him, but righteousness and 
judgment are the habitation of his throne.'' It is 
not necessary that an object should be under- 
stood in order to be practical. The indistinct is 
always more impressive than the definite. We 
are sure that no object can be very great when 
such beings as we can perfectly understand it. 
We are awed and silenced by the things which 
cannot be comprehended. In the Scripture 
teaching of God he is spoken of only in symbols, 
and his power is made evident before his love. 
Before he is revealed as Father, he is the Cre- 
ator who calls chaos into order. Fatherhood, 
when applied to Deity, gains significance from 
the vast indistinctness in which the Creator is 
hidden. Job acknowledged this truth in mag- 
nificent words : ^^ I know that thou canst do all 
things, and that no purpose of thine can be re- 
strained. Who is this that hideth counsel with- 
out knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that 
which I understood not ; things too wonderful for 
m.e, which I knew not." ^ This follows that 
matchless series of questions which had been put 
to Job giving hints of the glory and majesty of 
the Almighty: ^^ Where wast thou when I laid 
the foundations of the earth? .... Hast thou 

* Job xlii. 2, 3. 



THE INCARNATION, . 137 

entered into the springs of the sea ? Where is 
the way to the dawning of Hght?" The power 
of God is impressed by hints and symbols ; and 
these are always poor things when compared with 
the truths they are used to illustrate. 

The first point to be noted as to the incarnation 
of Deity in human form is that it was to have 
been expected. The presumptions are all in its 
favor. Almost all religions have taught that in 
some way God or the gods have been incarnate in 
the interests of humanity. This gives no reason 
for concluding that therefore all professed incar- 
nations are false, but it rather indicates that what 
has been so long and widely anticipated will some 
time be realized. The Greek doctrine of incar- 
nation, the Hindoo, the Egyptian, and the rude 
beliefs among less cultivated people, all point to- 
ward the reasonable probability of that well-nigh 
universal faith. Furthermore, if the Being whom 
vv^e call God has any existence, it is probable that 
he would in some way make himself known to his 
creatures. It is necessary to our idea of God that 
love be the governing motive in his being. 
Certainly all will acknowledge that they believe 
in the goodness and love of God, even though 
they find it difficult to believe in the divinity of 
Jesus. Is it possible to think of a God of love 
with power to make himself known to his crea- 
tures who are endowed with ability to receive 
revelations from him, but who yet leaves them 
without the knowledge of himself which most 



138 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

they need? The Deism of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries was the coldest, most unrea- 
sonable, and most unfruitful faith ever held by in- 
telligent men. It taught that God existed, but 
that there was no relation and no communication 
between himself and his universe. He was out- 
side and above it, and cared no more for it than 
an architect for a house which he has designed, 
or a watchmaker for a watch which he has regu- 
lated and sent away forever. 

In our study of this subject we begin with a 
consideration of certain facts in experience 
which are almost, if not quite, universal. 

Thoughtful men are constantly reaching out for 
knowledge, — such as can come only from above, 
which cannot be found by searching. We want 
to know whether there is a Being above us on 
whom we are dependent. We are dissatisfied 
with the best knowledge that man can give. 
Knowing our own ignorance, we have no confi- 
dence in those who are but little wiser than our- 
selves. 

We crave sympathy, — such as our fellow-mortals 
cannot give. When the best they have has been 
offered, there are depths in our souls that are not 
touched. That indescribable and inappeasable 
hunger is a prophecy, some time to be fulfilled. 

We long for some one to silence the voice of 
remorse. It is impossible to exaggerate the con- 
stancy or awfulness of the misery caused byj 
being at enmity with the universe. A man saysrj 



THE INCARNATION, 1 39 

'' I am wrong, and the air palpitates with voices 
charging me with guilt, and I long for some one 
to do for me what I cannot do for myself " ; 
and that longing follows as pitilessly as our 
shadows. 

The terrible mystery of death faces us every- 
where. We live, we love, we get ready to be 
happy, and the scythe of the Dark Angel cuts 
our fairest at a breath, and we go on desolate, 
waiting for our turn to fall. Why do men study? 
Why are they ambitious ? Why do they seek 
wealth or power, when the end is so near at 
hand ? These are the oldest questions ; but they 
are also the newest. 

Now, these longings are facts : they are nearer 
to us and more real than houses and lands ; they 
never go avv^ay, but gather intensity with the 
years. Each person who thinks at all presents 
the spectacle of a being eagerly, constantly, and 
spontaneously reaching up toward some One 
whom he instinctively feels must be, but whom 
he cannot find ; of a solitary, lonely heart crying 
for companionship which men cannot give ; of a 
discordant being out of harmony w^th the 
universe, appealing — consciously or unconscious- 
ly — to some One able to put him into right rela- 
tions with it ; of a vital, rational being endowed 
with capacity for endless growth and w^ith cravings 
for immortality, reaching out aspirations and 
longings, like antennae, into the darkness. Is it 
probable that these questionings were intended 



I40 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

never to be answered ? I cannot believe it. 
My friends, as one who has knocked long and 
.earnestly at the door of the unknown, who 
has felt the weight of these terrible mysteries 
until they have seemed no longer endurable, I 
say to you that the most unreasonable thing in 
the world is to imagine that these universal long- 
ings of humanity can go forever unsatisfied. The 
longing is for that which can be realized only by 
a divine Person ; and therefore, before I open my 
Bible and before I catch a single note of the 
music of the gospel of love, I am convinced that 
the only reasonable thing for an intelligent man 
to believe is that the same Being who implanted 
these aspirations and capacities has planned also 
to satisfy them. Therefore it is that I say an 
incarnation was to have been expected. 

Having then established this presumption, we 
consider certain thoughts concerning the Chris- 
tian doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, 
the Christ. Should the objection be raised that 
what has been said points toward an incarnation, 
but not toward the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, 
the reply is. If Jesus Christ is not God's answer 
to the aspirations of humanity, then they have no 
answer. Then you and I are 

*' Children crying in the night, 
And with no language but a cry/' 

What is the Christian doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion ? I shall make no attempt to speak with 



THE INCARNATION. I4I 

precision on this subject, simply because it is 
impossible. What the Bible never once at- 
tempts to express it is not likely men will ever be 
able satisfactorily to define. And the Bible 
never, once defines the Incarnation or the Atone- 
ment. There is apparently the most sublime 
disregard as to whether they are understood or 
not. Paul speaks of '' God manifest in the flesh" ; 
but when we ask, How manifest? we have no 
reply. He says: ^' God was in Christ reconcil- 
ing the world unto himself;" but when we put 
our question again, How was God in Christ? 
there is no answer. All any one can do under 
such circumstances is to explain the mystery to 
himself as well as he can, remembering that 
what helps one may only hinder another. 

To me, the Incarnation means that the limit- 
less, omnipresent Deity in some unknown way 
manifested himself through a human body ; that 
he united himself to humanity for the purpose of 
redeeming it. This is not saying that he usually 
sits on a throne in far-away halls, and that when 
he came to earth the throne was vacant : he was 
as much as ever on the throne when our Lord 
was on the earth. God is everywhere, — but this 
is not saying that he is everywhere manifest. 
He is everywhere, but we do not see him. If we 
ever see him so as to know and be influenced by 
him, he must adapt himself to our capacity and 
our condition. If you try to teach a child as- 
tronomy, you use words the child can under- 



142 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

stand ; and so, if men are ever taught of God, it 
must be in ways they can comprehend. That 
is. Deity must come into human form and use 
human language ; and therefore St. Paul speaks 
of him as " manifest in the flesh.*' 

Dr. A. A. Hodge, in his Theological Lectures, 
has expressed the idea in what he calls '' The 
parable of light." '^ Let it, then, be marked that 
light in its essence is absolutely invisible and 

passes all apprehension Light makes 

manifest all things from which it is radiated or 
upon v/hich it is reflected, but is itself utterly 
invisible and unknown. Thus it is w^ith God the 
Father. Through infinite time he fills infinite 
space, and he is the abyss from which all things 
flow and into which all things tend ; yet no man 
hath or can see God at any time : the only-begot- 
ten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he 
hath declared him. 

" Light itself makes all things visible on which 
it falls and from which it is reflected, but it be- 
comes itself visible only in a radiant point or 
disk, like that of the insufferable sun from 
which it floods the world. Suppose some angel 
or other inhabitant of an outlying province of 
creation, v/ho had often heard of the wonders 
and splendors of light, though he had never seen 
them, — suppose him to wander far afield through 
the nether darkness in search of this hitherto 
unseen wonder. If such an one suddenly should 
rise beyond the crest of some eclipsing shadow. 



THE INCARNATION, 143 

and without transition stand face to face with 
our central sun, would he not with rapt wonder 
naturally hail the sun with language similar to 
that used in Scripture to express the essential 
relation of the eternal Word to God ? — * All hail ! 
thou art the very light I seek ; thou art the word 
of light, its uttered form ; thou art its express 
image in which this visible source of all life and 
knowledge may be beheld ; thou art the radi- 
ancy of its inexhaustible glory. All its fullness 
dwells in thee bodily.' Thus God the Father is 
never known except as he is seen in the person 
of the Son." ^ 

The finite cannot comprehend the Infinite, but 
it can manifest him. He has come into manifes- 
tation in a human form once, and, so far as we 
know, only once ; and all we know of God, ex- 
cept his power and wisdom in creation, we see in 
Jesus Christ. Thus God was everywhere the 
same as before, but was expressed or manifest in 
humanity only at one place. By this illustration 
we see how we can speak of God as in a man and 
as, at the same time, everywhere. 

We read, " The Word was made flesh." It 
was '' in the beginning." ^* Beginning," — when 
was it? Where was it? ^^ Beginning," — before 
the earth had been gathered from chaos, and 
while the air was yet unfanned by angel's wing. 
*^ Beginning," — that which stands for sometliing 

* pp. 133-134. 



144 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

inexpressible. In that beginning the Word was ; 
and the Word was with God. And then the 
dimax: '^ The Word was God." *^The Word.'* 
There has been but one opinion, so far as I 
know, concerning this Scripture. Word means 
the expression of something. A word is a 
thought expressing itself; and the thought does 
not exist before the word. We think in words. 
With us, as truly as with God, the word exists 
in the beginning. It is the nature of God to 
manifest himself. He has made such revelation 
in different ways; so far as we know he has man- 
ifested himself but once in the flesh. If now 
you say : This does not help me to understand 
the mystery, I reply, Probably not. The Scrip- 
ture is vague, and purposely so. Our Master ex- 
pressly says that this is a subject which cannot 
be understood. '' No man knoweth the Father 
save the Son and he to whom the Son will re- 
veal him." That is, God may be known by rev- 
elation. But what will you say to the following ? 
— ^^ No man knoweth the Son save the Father." 
God may be known and man may be known ; but 
how the two become one is not the subject of 
revelation. What God has closed let not man 
try to open. There is mystery here, of course. 
There is mystery about the color of a rose. The 
light fills space. It wraps systems and constella- 
tions in splendor. It is a luminous ocean in 
which worlds sail. And yet the light comes into 
a little room in your house and searches out a 



THE INCARNATION. 1 45 

tiny flower, which could not by searching find it, 
and makes it more beautiful than anything man 
ever made. The mystery in the one case is as 
great as in the other. When you tell me how 
the light which palpitates from the sun paints 
the colors of that lonely rose, I will tell you how 
God, who is everywhere, comes into one Man and 
so truly lives in him that it is right to say that 
when we see him we see God. 

By the Incarnation, then, I mean this, — the 
Infinite, Eternal, and only God in his own way 
manifesting himself in and through a Man, so 
that the two are one, and yet God is everywhere 
as before. 

You ask me if God has manifested himself in 
other worlds. I answer, I do not know ; but if 
there are beings there who need him, without 
doubt he has gone to them in such a way as he 
knew to be best, simply because he is Father. 
But one more question : Will he ever manifest 
himself again on earth ? If love requires it, he 
will. But the second manifestation will be when 
God shall be in the whole human race as he was 
before in Jesus of Nazareth, and all humanity 
shall be the final incarnation of Divinity. 

The Incarnation was the fulfillment of an eter- 
nal purpose. The union of God with man was 
no sudden expedient made necessary by human 
sin. With all reverence it may be said that 
there would have been an incarnation if there 
had been no sin. It was a necessity to the 



146 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

nature of God. Shall we say that God would 
give to those who had violated his laws and re- 
fused his love an ineffably more glorious mani- 
festation of himself than to those who had been 
always faithful ? Do parents give their best 
gifts to the children who neglect their wishes 
and disobey their commands ? There are depths 
of fatherhood and motherhood never fathomed 
by those who leave the circles of love in which 
they have been reared ; and there is a richness 
and splendor in the revelation of God to those 
who have not sinned which you and I cannot 
appreciate. 

But is there any passage of Scripture which 
authorizes the speaking of the manifestation of 
God as determined before the creation ? In the 
Apocalypse is one which speaks of '^ the Lamb 
slain from the foundation of the world." If 
there were no other, this would be enough. The 
Incarnation was part of the purpose of God as 
truly as the Creation. ^^ The Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world." The Lamb is the 
symbol of love ; and ^' the Lamb slain," of love 
reaching to death. What does all this mean 
except that the manifestation of God in sacrifice 
was part of his eternal purpose ? In the spirit- 
ual world, as in the physical, all is ordered by 
infinite wisdom. There is no chance. God was 
not surprised by the sin of man. Whatever is, 
was foreseen. The world was not left to be 
filled with misery and wickedness while the 



I 



THE INCARNATION. 147 

Creator slept, afterward awaking to find that 
the Evil One had gotten the better of him. He 
knew that possession of freedom carried possi- 
bility of its misuse. He knew that there would 
be sin, and provided to meet it before it existed. 
If it had not existed, God would have been the 
same and his richest gift would not have been 
withheld. 

The Word which was made flesh was in the be- 
ginning with God, and was God. God always 
has been and always will be the same as in the 
manifestation on the cross. By the Incarnation 
the past is to be interpreted. We read of the slow 
development of humanity from conditions almost 
bestial ; of wars in which neither sex nor age w^as 
regarded; of moral corruption which words fail 
to express ; we read of worship which was a 
crime, like that at Corinth ; we see the remnants 
and ruins of conditions miserable beyond de- 
scription ; we read of whole continents from 
which had apparently disappeared the knowledge 
of God and appreciation of virtue, and there 
seems to be some terrible mockery and injustice 
on the throne of the universe. What must 
child-life have been when all the streams of heri- 
tage were polluted and there were no ideals 
above pleasure and profit ! What must mature 
life have been when all motives to morality were 
thrown down ! On souls deeply sensitive the 
knowledge of these things rests like mountains. 
And what has been the result of a study of his- 



148 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

tory ? Where it has been without faith in God 
as Father, it has led to hopelessness and despair. 
But our doctrine teaches that God had never for- 
gotten the world. He was not the Friend of a 
few egotistical and quarrelsome Hebrews, and 
the Enemy of all others. He has always been 
what Jesus Christ was on the earth. Jesus 
dying on the cross to save publicans and harlots, 
Roman soldiers, and heathen philosophers, was 
all anticipated when the Lamb was ** slain from 
the foundation of the world." The Atonement 
expressed God's eternal nature. The nations 
whose ruins, buried by the dust of centuries, are 
just coming to light in Mexico, in Central Amer- 
ica, in Asia, were all in the hands of Him who in 
the fullness of time assumed a human form, not to 
begin, but to ca7'ry on, a work which was begun 
before the morning stars sang together. " God 
so loved the world that he sent his Son.*' The 
fathers and mothers who have had their children 
torn from their arms by death, little children 
with jubilant life and throbbing anticipations, 
have not seen them cast as rubbish to the void. 
He who took little children in his arms and 
blessed them was in the beginning with God 
and was God. Jesus with the little ones was a 
manifestation of the Love that had been ever 
since birth and death began. 

The Advent was the beginning of the manifes- 
tation of God in humanity: but that manifesta- 
tion was nothing sudden and unconsidered ; it 



THE INCARNATION. 149 

was not a change of nature ; it was the fulfillment 
of a purpose whose formation is hidden in eternity. 
Throughout all past ages men have been, and 
throughout all future ages will be, in the hands 
that were pierced, the blessed hands of him who 
prayed : '^ Father, forgive," who was in the begin- 
ning with God, and was God. 

The Incarnation is a prophecy of the final state 
of humanity. The Advent points both toward 
the past and the future, toward what has been 
and what is to be. In Him we behold what the 
race is some time to become. For this our Master 
prayed that last night in his intercessory prayer: 
**And the glory which thou hast given me I have 
given unto them ; that they may be one even as 
we are one ; I in them and thou in me, that they 
may be perfected into one." God in Christ and 
Christ in his followers — humanity and God in 
one, — this is the prophecy. What does it mean ? 
That in Jesus Christ is seen the ideal which will 
be finally realized in the race. To-day nations 
are armed to the teeth, millions of men are await- 
ing orders ; and the possible bloodshed, the tears, 
broken hearts, ruined homes, and misery like an 
ocean are because of human selfishness. Given a 
real Christian on the throne of the Tsars, another 
in Vienna, another in Berlin, and another in Paris, 
and these millions of men would be disarmed in 
a day and sent among the peaceful and produc- 
tive industries. Four men with Christ in their 
hearts in the places of power would make war 



ISO SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

impossible. And such men will some time be in 
the places of power. The story of the sorrows 
and suffering of the working-women is a terrible 
one. Whatever the remedy may be, the fact is 
that thousands of women are living with starva- 
tion staring them in the face and the terrible 
alternative before them, starve or sin. It is easy 
for those who have enough to say, " Such things 
need not be;" but they are, and they are in part 
kept so by men who with one hand rob them, and 
with the other give to charity from what they steal. 
When all are like Jesus Christ, no law of com- 
petition will be allowed to separate the children 
of God from one another. When all are like him, 
it will be no longer possible to say: ** There was 
never so much money idle, never so much food 
unused, and never so many starving people in the 
land." All the world like Jesus! Each man 
going about to do good ; no men living double 
lives ; no women by their selfishness and pride 
driving to wickedness those whom they ought to 
help ; no cruelty; no one to fawn and smile and 
secretly stab; no harsh judgments; no unkind 
words ; each one willing to pray concerning the 
mistakes of his brother — if we can imagine mis- 
takes in such a world — '' Father, forgive them." 
Jesus said, ''The kingdom of God is within you," 
and in him we see the perfected race. Think of 
it. No war ; no tramp, tramp, tramp of millions 
to kill one another; no clanking of chains on 
plantations or in prisons ; no divided families; no 



THE INCARNATION. Ijl 

professing Christians treating one another Hke 
heathens ; no crushing monopoHes ; no scandal- 
mongers ; no busy-bodies ; none growing rich at 
the expense of the welfare of their brethren ; all 
bearing each other's burdens, hiding each other's 
faults, helping each other in their weakness, 
doing as they would be done by, looking unto 
Him who is invisible as to the dearest and kind- 
est and best of all friends, and ^' trusting Him 
whate'er betide." The response to all this will be 
perhaps: ''A beautiful dream!" It is not a 
dream. It is the prophecy of the Incarnation. 
This and more must be when all men are one 
with Jesus Christ as he is one with God. Where 
God is, darkness flees away. 

And this is prophesied by more than the Incar- 
nation. The change which has come over history 
since the Advent shows that the new creation is 
slowly but surely filling the earth. Eighteen 
hundred years ago, slavery was in all civilized 
lands: to-day it is abolished by all civilized lands. 
Eighteen hundred years ago, in the most magnifi- 
cent temples, licentiousness was worship: to-day 
it is a shame to speak of such things. Eighteen 
hundred years ago, families of culture and the 
rulers of the world's greatest empire sought pleas- 
ure in seeing gladiators kill one another: to-day 
even the fighting of animals for pleasure is almost 
everywhere prohibited. Eighteen hundred years 
ago there was not a hospital nor asylum nor home 
for outcast children on the earth: to-day such in- 



152 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

stitutions shine like stars in the world's darkness. 
Eighteen hundred years ago, criminals were in- 
carcerated in pits, caves, and slimy dungeons : to- 
day nearly all civilized nations remember that a 
criminal has not ceased to be a man. Eighteen 
hundred years ago, the doctrine of the Fatherhood 
of God was not known, and men thought that 
peace for a guilty conscience could be ob- 
tained only by attempting impossible things in 
the way of expiation: to-day, on Indian moun- 
tains, by African rivers, in European cities, on 
American prairies, beneath the Southern Cross, 
on Pacific islands, on ships that furrow the great 
waters, there is echoed the doxology of the ages, 
^^ Glory be to the Father.'* The Incarnation is 
the prophecy of a day which has already dawned. 
The Incarnation is a revelation of the process 
by which this prophecy is to be realized. The 
whole life of Jesus may be expressed in one word, 
self-renunciation. He was never anxious about 
what people should think of him ; he refused 
worship; insulted, he returned blessing; he 
spent almost all his time with two classes, — 
sufferers and sinners. To relieve suffering and 
to save from sin was the end of his ministry. 
With infinite power at his command, he refused 
to use it to defend himself. The principle of 
his life he stated in these words: *'He that 
would save his life shall lose it, and he that loses 
his life shall find it." From the baptism to the 
cross he was always thinking of others. The 



i 



THE INCARNATION. 153 

more he was abused the more tireless became 
his efforts to do good. He practiced his own 
preaching and proved that it is best, when smitten 
on one cheek, to turn the other also. He said, 
^'And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto 
me.'' His self-renunciation was the secret of his 
power. He died, and committed his work to 
his disciples ; by following in his footsteps they 
were to complete what he began. The Incarna- 
tion means self-renunciation. By that alone can 
Christ's work be continued. Those who work 
with him must be like him. They must be 
willing to be insulted without resenting it ; they 
must work for the good they can do, not for the 
reward they can get ; they must not expect ap- 
preciation ; they must not seek self-elevation. It 
must be with churches as with individuals. The 
church which seeks to up-build itself and fill its 
pews, and which makes the salvation of men and 
their growth in righteousness secondary', is not a 
church of Christ. His church is composed of 
those, in all sects, and outside of all, — and those 
only, — w^ho ask no questions about self or reward, 
but who move straight on in delivering the mes- 
sage of warning and invitation, regardless of con- 
sequences. 

And what examples of this spirit glorify the 
history of the church ! Twelve apostles, and ten 
of that twelve martyrs — this tells something. An 
English writer pictures a beautiful young woman 
of the nobility going to the slums of East London 



154 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

and living in a tenement-house, that she might 
become acquainted with the women w^ho w^ere 
slowly killing themselves with their needles. *^ An 
exquisite picture of heroic self-devotion, but only 
a novel!" you say. Yes, only a novel; but that 
novel tells of the only way by which want and 
woe can be permanently relieved — by some one 
from above going down and living among the 
sorrows he would lighten. The English novelist 
borrowed his conception from the New Testa- 
ment. A Moravian missionary sold himself as a 
slave that he might preach the gospel to slaves 
and be heard — that is what incarnation means. 
In the heart of Central Africa, good Bishop Han- 
nington has just been offered as a sacrifice by 
savages. They kept him as a curiosity until 
afraid that death would rob them of their prize, 
and then they killed him. And now the 
eyes of all the world are on that heathen tribe, 
and the work of the Bishop will move more swift- 
ly because of his death. Luther's self-sacrifice 
made the Reformation possible. The fires around 
Savonarola filled Europe with light. The Pilgrims 
renounced home, wealth, comfort, because of de- 
votion to truth, and unwittingly laid the founda- 
tions of the great Republic. All who serve 
humanity and all who hasten the ^^ one far-off 
divine event to which the whole creation moves" 
begin with the central truth of the Incarnation 
— self-renunciation. 

Some time the Kingdom of God will come; 



THE IXCARNATION, 155 

some time men will do as they would be done by ; 
and it will be because the Incarnation has been 
completed and the whole human race has become 
one with God. 

The Incarnation was the fulfillment of an eternal 
purpose : it was a prophecy of what men are to 
become: it was a picture of the v/ay by which 
the prophecy will be realized. The divine voice 
is sounding still: '' Behold I stand at the door 
and knock," and still it is given to you and to me 
to decide whether we shall, by renouncing self 
and opening our hearts, become one with Jesus 
Christ, as he was one with the Father. 



VIII. 

The Vicarious Principle in the 
Universe. 



" Given the universality of love, the universality of vicarious 
sacrifice is given also." — Horace Bushnell. 

"There is, perhaps, no greater satisfaction to the Christian 
than that which arises from his perceiving that the Revealed 
system is rooted deep in the natural course of things, of which 
it is merely the result and completion; that his Saviour has in- 
terpreted for him the faint and broken accents of nature; and 
that in them, so interpreted, he has, as if in some old prophecy, 
at once the evidence and the lasting, memorial of the truths of 
the Gospel." — John Henry Newman. 

" The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life which 
is lived, not to self but to God." — F. W. Robertson. 

'* Life evermore is fed by death, 
In earth, and sea, and sky; 
And that a rose may breathe its breath, 
Something must die." 



VIII. 

The VrcARious Principle in the Universe. 

' * Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows : . . . 
the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his stripes 
we are healed." — Isaiah liii. 4, 5. 

The purpose of this sermon is not a discus- 
sion of the doctrine of the Atonement, nor to 
enter into any extended consideration of its na- 
ture. Its primary object is to show that the 
Atonement was something without which the 
universe would have been as incomplete as our 
solar system without the planet Jupiter. The 
Vicarious Principle in the Universe is the large 
form, in which our subject phrases itself, and I 
know not how to simplify it. 

Does the vicarious principle find expression in 
all parts of the universe, in all gradations of life, 
or is it something which comes into prominence 
and culminates only in the supreme event of 
human history, the death of Jesus Christ? 

What does the word '^vicarious" signify? 
The common definition is, ^^The position, place, 
office, of one person as assumed by another. 
Acting or suffering for another." The origin 
of the word is evident. It is the same in the 



l6o SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

root as *'vice" in *Wicegerent/' ^'viceroy/' 
*^ vicar/' '^ vicar-general," ^' vice-president," and 
the like. It is a word which carries always a 
face of substitution, indicating that one person 
comes in place of another. A vice-president is 
one who is to act in certain contingencies as, and 
for, the president. The Pope is called the Vicar 
of Christ because supposed to be authorized to 
fill Christ's place. Any person acts vicariously 
so far as he comes into the place and assumes 
the duties, the sufferings, the responsibilities of 
another. The word is not found in the Bible. 
It has been adopted, however, to express the 
central thought of the Bible. 

The definition given above seems to confine 
vicarious relations to persons, but the principle 
may be as true of an animal as of a man. The 
horse which is cut loose from the traces for the 
wolves to feed upon, while the master escapes, 
dies instead of the man. A traveler accom- 
panied by his dog is starving. He must die or kill 
the dog for food. The death of the dog is the 
life of the man. The one dies instead of the 
other. This principle is the condition of all ex- 
istence. A note in an admirable article on 
" Natural Selection and Natural Theology," by 
Eustace R. Conder, D.D., gives the following: 
*^ Another comprehensive and profoundly impres- 
sive view of design is presented by the mutual 
relations of plants and animals. The consti- 
tution of the atmosphere is equally indispensable 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPIE. l6l 

to each order of life ; but each draws in from the 
air that which sustains its own Hfe and is death 
to the other, and returns that which to itself is 
useless, or poisonous, but which to the other is 
the breath of life. The relations of herbivorous 
and carnivorous animals are another illustration. 
Yet a writer whom I have before quoted has the 
hardihood to say that ' If all, or even some, 
species had been so interrelated as to each 
other's necessities, organic species might then have 
been likened to a countless multitude of voices 
all singing in one harmonious psalm of praise. 
But, as it is, we see no vestige of such co-ordina- 
tion ; each species is for itself, and for itself 
alone — an outcome of the always and every- 
where fiercely raging struggle for life.' " To 
this Dr. Conder replies: ^^ This reckless assertion 
is refuted by the flavor of every peach, the 
chemical composition of every morsel of our 
daily food ; by the labor of every earth-worm 
plowing his dark path underground ; by the 
structure of every wheat-plant storing the food 
on which the labor, commerce, politics, public 
and family life of nations depend. One person 
or thing taking the place of another, in some 
way and for some purpose, prevails everywhere. 
Even the doctrine of Evolution requires the vi- 
carious principle, the life of the higher rising out 
of and conditioned upon the death of the lower. 
According to this doctrine of Evokition there is 
a scheme of adaptation to circumstances, which 



l62 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

reaches through all time, from the first appear- 
ance of life on our globe, which enlists all the 
force of the universe, co-ordinates kll the con- 
ditions of life, bases birth and growth on decay 
and death, and maintains in stable equilibrium 
this immense living Whole, every member of 
which is momently undergoing dissolution and 
reconstruction." ^ 

The meaning and reach of the principle of 
which we are speaking is now evident. 
Throughout all that we know of the universe in 
which we dwell, runs the principle of one 
taking the place of another to perform its office, 
to endure its trials, voluntarily or involuntarily 
to do or be something for another, or for others, 
without which they could not be what they are 
or do what they do. The Why of the vicarious 
relationships is among the mysteries. They 
are facts. There must they be left. 

We will consider a few illustrations. 

Through all we know of the universe there is 
the fact of vicarious service. By '' service" I do 
not mean what is technically called ^^ sacrifice," al- 
though there may be an element of sacrifice in 
it. Everywhere the work of one takes the place 
of that of others and is truly vicarious, unless it 
should be maintained that there is always a con- 
scious delegation of duties where this element is 
found. Work for another, or instead of another, 

■^ Contemporary Review, Sept. 1882, p. 26. 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE, 1 63 

is recognized as legitimate and universal. There 
is in it no injustice. The universe is constructed 
with a place for vicarious service. It is found 
among animals. The eagle gathers food for his 
mate and the eaglets. The lion brings his prey 
and drops it for his cubs to feed upon. The 
tiniest bird recognizes his duty to take the place 
of his mate as a provider while the eggs are 
hatching. This is instinct. Yes, but it is a case 
where instinct leads to the performance of duties 
which, under other circumstances, would be per- 
formed by some one else. It is, therefore, an in- 
stance of vicarious service. 

From Constantinople comes a story of sea- 
gulls. One became wounded. The next day the 
flock, as if by prearrangement, started off over the 
sea of Marmora ; but they left behind them their 
wounded companion and two others to minister 
to his wants. These brought him food. They 
waited by him until his strength should increase. 
After a day or two, the three rose from the 
ground and started on their flight. Soon the 
wings of the wounded bird failed. Then his com- 
panions went under him and carried him, until he 
was rested. They used their wings instead of 
his. This was vicarious service. 

This principle needs no more than a mention 
when applied to human life. Parents stand 
in a vicarious relation to their children. Officers 
of state occupy the same relation toward their 
constituents. Every judge, juror, legislator, and 



164 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

all executive officers, perform duties which 
belong to others, and because we have many 
duties we delegate a part to those who can give 
to them their whole attention. Officers of state 
are, vicariously, servants. They stand in our 
places, as our representatives, to do work which 
we must either do or have done. 

Vicarious service may be performed and its end 
accomplished when there is no conscious or vol- 
untary participation in it by the one helped. I 
may owe a debt to the bank. That debt may 
be canceled by an unknown friend, and it is as 
really canceled as if I had paid it myself ; but I 
have no right to compel another to pay my debts 
or to be my servant. The universe serves the 
individual. Its laws and forces bring to him 
what he cannot get, and do for him what he can- 
not do, for himself. He is sick. All his skill and 
knowledge of remedies fail. The sunshine and 
air come to him and make a new man of him. 
They have done something for him — instead of 
him. 

The following passage from Robertson*s ser- 
mon on '' Caiphas's View of Vicarious Sacrifice" 
exactly illustrates vicarious service, but hardly vi- 
carious sacrifice. I will substitute the word ser- 
vice for sacrifice. '^ Vicarious service is the law of 
being. It is a mysterious and fearful thing to ob- 
serve how all God's universe is built upon this 
law, how it penetrates and pervades all nature, 
so that, if it were to cease, nature would cease to 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE. 1 65 

exist. The mountain-rock must have its surface 
rusted into putrescence and become dead soil be- 
fore the herb can grow. The destruction of the 
mineral is the life of the vegetable. Upon the 
life of the vegetable world, the myriad forms of 
higher life sustain themselves — still the same 
law. Farther still : have we never pondered 
over that mystery of nature — the dove struck 
dumb by the hawk — the deer trembling beneath 
the stroke of the lion — the winged fish falling in- 
to the jaws of the dolphin ? It is the same solemn 
law again." 

In this fact of service there may be the 
action of a will, and there may be only the 
operation of a law. Service may be voluntary 
or involuntary. The principle of vicarious ser- 
vice is universal. 

Another fact equally conspicuous is the uni- 
versality of vicarious suffering. This is one of 
the gloomiest problems that the mind ever 
fronts. The innocent suffer for the guilty — not 
merely in behalf of, but instead of, the guilty. 
Suffering which results from effort to help has in 
it an element of compensation. Suffering which 
comes simply because one has the misfortune to 
be related to those who transgress law, and 
which is entailed by the folly of others without 
volition of those afflicted, all are powerless to 
prevent. This is a mystery of mysteries. The 
members of the race are tied together inextrica- 
bly. The law of heredity is universal and re- 



1 66 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

morseless. One may have nothing but pleasure. 
His indulgences are so regulated that they never 
get control of him. He gets the honey from 
them, but his course is such that his child is 
born with a tendency to evil which is well-nigh re- 
sistless. The father may eat sweet grapes, and the 
children's teeth be set on edge. The whole 
history of the doctrine of heredity illustrates 
the fact of which we are speaking, -^schylus as 
explicitly as Ezekiel declares that an old transgres- 
sion sometimes abides to the third generation, 
as illustrated in the unhappy family of Laius : 

" With urgent force the Fury treadeth 
To generations three, 
Avenging Laius' sin on Laius' race." * 

Again, in these terrible lines is repeated the 
recognition of the same fact : 

" What hath been, and shall be ever. 
That when purple gouts bedash 
The guilty ground, then blood doth blood 
Demand, and blood for blood shall flow. 
Fury to Havoc cries ; and Havoc, 
The tainted track of blood pursuing, 
From age to age works woe." f 

A mother dresses her child with short stockings 
and takes him into the bitter cold on a winter's 
day. She is closely wrapped in seal-skins. The 
child is made an invalid for life. The suffering 
is the child's — the error the mother's. The prob- 
lem of punishment in government is an exceed- 

* '' Thebes," 742. t ''Choephon," 398. 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE, 1 6/ 

ingly difficult one to arrange. A man was a 
defaulter. His punishment was years in state- 
prison. His wife had committed no sin. Her 
disgrace came upon her Hke hghtning from a 
clear sky. It was her misfortune to have such a 
husband. She suffered because of his crime. 
She endured what he could not endure. An im- 
becile pope and an intriguing emperor cunningly 
made two women believe that it was for the good 
of the church and the glory of Christ to have 
the power of Romanism once more dominant in 
the ancient land of the Aztecs. Pio Nono and 
Francis Joseph employed Carlotta, daughter of 
Leopold of Belgium, and Eugenie of France to 
influence the French Emperor to establish Maxi- 
milian in Mexico. The farce was prolonged until 
it became a tragedy. The French Emperor was 
more anxious for himself than for Maximilian, 
and left him to his own resources. The Pope had 
nothing but words to offer. Juarez rallied the 
republicans and overthrew the Empire. The 
Grand Duke who sought to be Emperor was 
shot. And now for years poor Carlotta has been 
insane, imagining at one time that her husband 
is coming to her, and then raving at those who 
detain him. She is suffering for others. It is 
not punishment, for the sin was not hers. Gui- 
teau fired a shot. General Garfield's eighty days 
of agony, the suffering of his wife and family, the 
anguish of his poor old mother, all resulted, be- 
sides the long trial, with its accompaniments of 



1 68 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

shame and disgrace. If the suffering had been 
punishment it would have fallen on the head of 
the criminal. Instead of his suffering others suf- 
fered, while he flaunted his egotism until it be- 
came a stench in the nostrils of the world. These 
are conspicuous examples. The principle is of 
wide application. Suffering marks its bloody 
pathway wherever human hearts beat. Parents 
bear the griefs and carry the sorrows of their 
children, as Christ bears the griefs and carries the 
sorrows of the world. A young man commits a 
sin, and, perhaps, half enjoys the publicity. The 
arrow pierces his mother's heart, and blood flows. 
Then there is another sphere of which it is diffi- 
cult to speak because the facts are hard to reach. 
Wives carry their husband's sins, and walk through 
long Gethsemanes with agony and bloody sweat 
which falls inward. The mistakes of youth fall 
with ruining force upon those who had no part in 
them, and who only happen to be linked to those 
from whose past they cannot escape. There is 
no solution of this problem. As days and nights 
are linked through the year, so are men who do 
wrong, and the innocent who suffer for their 
wrong-doing, linked together around the world. 

This doctrine of social liability is developed by 
iEschylus in the case of Amphiarus, " a discreet, 
upright, good, and pious man, who wished not to 
seem, but to be, good "—a great prophet who 
foresaw the disastrous issue of the Theban expe- 
dition, and forewarned the leaders, but who, led 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE. 1 69 

on by a high sense of honor, went with them and 
fell like them. Then says the poet, 

*' Death's unblest fruit is reaped 

By him who sows in Ate's fields. The man 
Who, being godly, with ungodly men 
And hot-brained sailors mounts the brittle bark, 
He, when the God-detested crew goes down, 
Shall with the guilty, guiltless perish." * 

Mrs. Browning's awful picture is true to life : 

" Breath freezes on my lips to moan : 
As one alone, once not alone, 
I sit and knock at nature's door, 
Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor, 
Whose desolated days go on." f 

If those who did wrong were the only suffer- 
ers, the sense of justice would temper the pain 
of the sight ; but when we remember that prob- 
ably ten innocent persons suffer for the wrong- 
doing of ever}^ guilty one ; when we see that they 
suffer what he and he only ought to endure, ac- 
cording to every law of justice, the problem be- 
comes one of appalling magnitude. Explanation 
is impossible. All that can be said is that the 
law of vicarious suffering, like the law of vicari- 
ous service, is universal. 

The universality of suffering has led to the 
theory, among ignorant people, that suffering 
was always to be regarded as punishment. Ca- 
lamity, pain of body, anguish of mind, have led 
men to believe that the gods were following with 

* " Thebes," 601. f " De Profundi^.'* 



170 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

vengeance. This fact leads us to ask whether 
there is, or has been, or can be, in the nature of 
things, any such thing as vicarious punishment ? 
Punishment is simply penalty for the transgres- 
sion of law. In the nature of things it can fall 
upon no one but the transgressor. If the blow 
falls upon another it ceases to be punishment. It 
may be called by any name which may be given 
it, but it can be called punishment only after the 
word has been entirely emptied of its original 
meaning. Guilt and penalty are never charged 
upon a person known to be innocent, although 
in a hundred ways that person may suffer for the 
guilt of others. Luther asserted this contradic- 
tion, and, in asserting it, denied the possibility 
of an innocent person being punished for the 
guilty. He declared that Christ became guilty 
of all the sins of all the thieves, adulterers, mur- 
derers, who ever lived, and then was punished be- 
cause He was guilty ; but he did not venture to 
say that being innocent He was punished. In 
order that I might present an opinion of real 
value on this subject, I addressed a letter to one 
of the most learned lawyers of New York, ask- 
ing him whether the principle of vicarious punish- 
ment, as distinct from vicarious suffering, was, or 
ever had been, recognized in human law. His 
answer was as follows : 

'^ Your inquiry as to vicarious punishment ad- 
mits of a more extended answer than you call 
for. Under municipal law it has never in a civil- 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE, I7I 

ized community been recognized except to the 
extent of making a part suffer for a larger num- 
ber of guilty, which is analogous to the military 
punishment of revolted soldiers by decimation ; 
or again, of holding sureties liable for principals, 
which in the case of bail for criminals was for- 
merly subject to a sort of personal penalty, if the 
principal failed to appear, or should be guilty of 
any wrong against which the surety undertook 
to be amenable. This also was analogous to the 
military usage of taking hostages, w^ho were 
held liable for any failure of the party giving the 
hostages to perform what was agreed. 

'' By the English common law a town was 
liable for robbery or riot committed within the 
limits, and all the inhabitants were subject to a 
tax which might be inflicted arbitrarily upon any 
number. In this country a like liability formerly 
existed for a debt of a city or town in case of 
the bankruptcy or refusal to pay by such city or 
town, but this is obsolete. The Roman law as to 
the decurions held them liable for the taxes im- 
posed upon a municipality, and this could be en- 
forced by penal infliction.** 

In no one of the cases mentioned in this letter 
is punishment for another*s crime inflicted on an 
innocent person. There is suffering because of 
connection with others. There is punishment 
because of offenses growing out of circumstances 
connected with the offenses, but in no case men- 



172 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

tioned in this letter is the innocent allowed to 
bear the penalty which belongs to another. 

The sacrifices of the Jews could hardly be ad- 
duced as exceptions to this rule. Among them 
*^no sacrifices secured forgiveness for specific 
moral offenses." ^ If that is true, evidently the 
guilt was never borne except in a symbolical way. 
Fairbairn, in ^^The Typology of Scripture," men- 
tions different classes of sins for which sacrifices 
were offered. ^^ If a man had knowingly failed 
*to bear testimony in a court of law against men 
whom he knew to be justly accused of a crime, 
he was required to confess his sin and bring a 
lamb or a kid for a sin-offering ; or, if he was 
poor, two turtle-doves, or two young pigeons; or 
a small quantity of fine flour, and then his sin was 
to be forgiven." f This sin-offering had nothing 
in it, however, of the nature of substituted punish- 
ment. Among other instances were those who 
had been guilty of an oath of which they 
were ignorant and which they could not per- 
form, fraud, adultery with a slave, etc.; yet in none 
of these cases was there substituted punishment. 
Dale says : '' God forgave only when by the 
voluntary act of the guilty the victim of injustice 
no longer suffered for the crime." % 

As to the bearing of this point on the death of 
Jesus Christ, it must be said that no one ever 

* Dale, *' Atonement," p. 466. 

f Clark's edition, 4th ed., vol. ii. pp. 317-392. 

X ** Atonement/' p. 469. 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPIE. 1/3 

thinks now of teaching that Christ was ^^ punished," 
but rather that his sufferings were substituted for 
our punishment, which is a very different thing. 

Mozley, in his sermon on the Atonement, in 
speaking of the objections made to the doctrine 
of the Atonement, says : ^* The point upon which 
the objector has fixed is the substitution of one 
man for another to suffer for sin ; but he has not 
taken this point as it is represented and inter- 
preted in the doctrine itself, but barely and na- 
kedly, simply as the principle of vicarious punish- 
ment. Thus stated then — that one man can be 
guilty of the crime, and another punished in his 
stead ; that a criminal can suffer penalty by 
deputy, and have sentence executed upon him by 
substitute — this notion of justice is a barbarous 
and untenable one. It is to be observed that ac- 
cording to this idea of sacrifice for sin, it is not in 
the least necessary that the sacrifice should be 
voluntary, because the whole principle of sacrifice 
is swallowed up in the idea of vicarious punish- 
ment ; and punishment, vicarious or other, does 
not require a voluntary sufferer, but only a suf- 
ferer. It was this low and degraded idea of 
sacrifice which had possession of the ancient 
world for so many ages, and which produced, as 
its natural fruit, human sacrifices, with all the 
horrible and revolting cruelties attending them. 
. . . As if, indeed, the Almighty could ever 
possibly be appeased by a struggling victim, 
dragged up in horror and agony to be a sacrifice 



174 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

for sin against his will, recoiling at every step 
from the purpose to which he was devoted." "^ 

The only exceptions, then, to the rule that vi- 
carious punishments are not recognized are the 
human sacrifices, — which may be typified by the 
sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis, or the bloody 
rites of the Druids in the oak groves of Mona, — a 
system which is recognized in the universe in the 
same train with pestilences, superstitions, and ex- 
crescences. But here again there were really 
no vicarious punishments ; there was only suf- 
fering on the part of those who were unfortu- 
nate enough to be chosen as victims of the sac- 
rifice. Dale, in his work on the Atonement, f 
says: ^^ If we attempt a theory of the death of 
Christ on the hypothesis that it corresponded to 
what would occur in the administration of human 
justice, if some illustrious man, as conspicuous 
for his virtue and public services as for his rank, 
died as a substitute for a number of obscure 
persons who had been guilty of treason, we are 
confronted at once by an objection which admits 
of no reply. Such a substitution could not be 
admitted. It would be contrary to the principles 
of justice, and in the highest degree injurious to 
the state." The Grecian king did not suffer 
half of his son's punishment ; he suffered some- 
thing which would express his horror of his son's 
crime, and vindicate the law as much as if his son 

* " University Sermons," pp. 165, 166. 
t p. 358. 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPIE. 1/5 

had suffered it all. No person can be punished 
for another. When an innocent man is executed 
he suffers because of the mistake of the state, but 
in the nature of things " punishment," as such, can 
be inflicted only on the criminal. 

In tracing the existence and operation of the 
vicarious principle we have already met facts 
which it has been hard to catalogue under the 
heads which have been named. As we rise in 
the scale of life we find not only service and 
suffering vicarious in their nature, but we find 
that they are voluntarily undertaken, and, further, 
that they are sought at a cost voluntarily given 
by the one serving or suffering. Here and there 
are examples of those who can expect nothing in 
return, voluntarily serving the lowest at the price 
of weariness and pain. That is sacrifice — vica- 
rious sacrifice, sacrifice which is necessitated by 
one who is higher assuming the place and enter- 
ing into the condition of another for his benefit. 
Sacrifice implies the giving of something for the 
privilege of serving. It differs from simple ser- 
vice, therefore, in that it is service at a cost, for 
no promised remuneration, and ahvays voluntary. 

The higher the order of life the more conspicu- 
ous does this fact become. At first there is only 
instinct, as when the parent bird provides for its 
young, or the mother suckles her infant. This 
can hardly be called sacrifice. Neither can the 
service done by those who arc our representa- 
tives in the administration of government be 



176 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

called sacrifice, since they usually work for pay, and 
their service may be as selfish as anything else. 
But by and by the mother sees her son in peril, 
and has to choose between her social pleasures 
and his safety. The struggle may be hard. She 
decides for her son. That is in a measure an act 
of sacrifice, though not the highest, because it is 
the result of a love of kindred. Many motives 
which are right may come in to help her decision, 
but which are yet more or less selfish. There is 
something in advance of this, although in all 
these there is somewhat that is vicarious. 

For example, note the devotion of patriots who 
die in battle for their country. Here is reached 
a sublime height of sacrifice. Men who, like 
Nathan Hale, calmly face the fact that some one 
must die in order that the country may live, are 
not perhaps very many, but still they confront us 
here and there in history. Such a man was En- 
gineer Leeds, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, 
w^hose act was one of the grandest ever recorded. 
I can never recall the picture of that man, with 
his pale face, his mouth fixed, his eyes eager, 
rushing to his duty and his death in the flames 
that six hundred people might live, without a 
thrill of something more than admiration. These 
men illustrate in its lower forms the principle of 
vicarious sacrifice. I say in its lower forms, for 
there is that in the consciousness of a great 
achievement, or in great danger, which may be 
rewarded even if only by a glorious name, which 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE, 1 77 

IS not quite free from the element of selfishness. 
Hale and Leeds died in sublime vicarious rela- 
tionships as truly as any men who ever lived ; yet 
the principle has still loftier illustrations. 

In a recent biography are the following words : 
*^ There they laid him on a rough bed in the hut 
where he spent the night. Next day he lay un- 
disturbed. He asked a few wandering questions 
about the country. Nothing occurred to attract 
notice during the early part of the night, but, at 
four o'clock in the morning, the boy who lay at 
his door called in alarm for Susi, fearing that their 
master was dead. By the candle still burning 
they saw him, not in bed, but kneeling at the 
bedside with his head buried in his hands upon 
the pillow. The sad yet not unexpected truth 
soon became evident : he had passed away on the 
farthest of all his journeys, and without a single 
attendant near him. But he had died in the act 
of prayer, — prayer offered in that reverential atti- 
tude about which he was always so particular." 
And who was that man? and what was he doing? 
His name the world knows. All alone he was 
trying to get the facts which would result in the 
healing of what he so vividly called '' the open 
sore of the world " — the slave trade. In the 
presence of Livingstone dead in equatorial Africa ; 
of John Howard sailing on an infected ship from 
Constantinople to Venice in order that he might 
be put into a lazaretto, and thus get some clue 
to the awful mystery of the plague for the pur- 



178 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

pose of destroying its power ; of Henry Martyn, 
the pride of the EngHsh universities, burying 
himself among the heathen, and dying of the 
plague at Tocat, few will fail to recognize a prin- 
ciple at work such as has not yet been mentioned 
in this sermon, and yet which is not altogether 
uncommon 

*' In this loud, swelling tide of human care and crime." 

This is vicarious sacrifice in its highest human 
manifestation. There have been examples of it 
in all ages and under all forms of religion. The 
Spirit of Christ has been at work many times 
where his name has been unknown. Always as 
men have become unselfish, as their capacity to 
love has been enlarged, the tendency to give at 
cost of labor, of pain, of life, if need be, to uplift 
and help others, has found freer expression. The 
natural language of joy is laughter ; of sorrow, a 
sigh ; of love, sacrifice. There can be no sacrifice 
which is not, according to the love in it, vicari- 
ous. If, then, there is a higher than human love, 
it will show itself in a higher than human sacri- 
fice, and will enter into the conditions and rela- 
tions of the objects of love. 

We are now in the presence of a great truth. 
According to the perfection of being is its ten- 
dency to enter into the conditions of those who 
are beneath and lowest, for the purpose of up- 
lifting and saving at any cost. Then, following 
all analogies of lower life, we must say — As the 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPLE, 1/9 

heavens are above the earth, so is God above 
man, and so much greater is the tendency of the 
love of God to enter into vicarious relationships 
with those who are in misery and sin. That is a 
magnificent thought of Dr. Bushnell — all " saints 
and angels in vicarious sacrifice,'' *^ the Eternal 
Father in vicarious sacrifice," ''' the Holy Spirit 
in vicarious sacrifice," — and yet Dr. Bushnell only 
copied it from the New Testament. 

The course of our argument is evident. In all 
created things, in life in all of its gradations, there 
is seen, dimly at first, but ever growing to clearer 
manifestation, the vicarious principle. This fact 
shows that the Incarnation and the sacrificial work 
of Jesus Christ, instead of being monstrous and 
without analogy in nature, are in harmony with 
the growth of universal life and in line with the 
process of history. 

Thus have been grouped a few facts concern- 
ing the vicarious principle. It is a part of the 
universe as the colors of a sunbeam are a part 
of the sun's rays. There are vicarious service, 
vicarious suffering, and vicarious sacrifice, — hon- 
ored among men and angels, and by the Deity 
himself. Vicarious punishment, so-called, has 
been practiced only in rude stages of society, and 
is conceivable only to imperfect and cruel con- 
ceptions of the Deity. 

It hardly needs a mention of passages to show 
that Jesus Christ entered into the vicarious con- 
dition so as to become the servant of man. He 



l8o SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

healed diseases ; the empty wine-jars blushed 
with new wine at the magic of his word; he 
went about doing good ; he washed the disciples' 
feet, even those of Peter and Judas. By as 
much as he was divinely perfect he appreciated 
the urgency of human infirmities; and by so 
much was his loving heart ever urging his willing 
hands to loving service, which was vicarious, 
because it was doing for others what they could 
not, or would not, do for themselves. 

Vicariously he bore human suffering. Like 
some sad sweet strain of ethereal music sounds 
the prophecy, "" He is despised and rejected of 
men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. 
.... Surely he hath borne our griefs and car- 
ried our sorrows. . . . He was wounded for our 
transgressions ; he was bruised for our iniquities ; 
the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and 
with his stripes we are healed.'' The pathos of 
that bitter cry, ^^ My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?'' show the completeness with which 
he had identified himself with man's expe- 
riences of sorrow. The world's suffering is an 
ocean : Jesus, ^^ the Christ of God," sounded its 
depths. 

Jesus Christ gave himself in vicarious sacrifice 
for man. " He made himself of no reputation 
and became obedient unto death, even the death 
of the cross." '' He gave his life a ransom for 
many." ^' But God commended his love to us, in 



THE VICARIOUS PRINCIPIE, l8l 

that while we were yet sinners Christ died for 
us." 

Jesus Christ as the representative man, the 
perfect man, performed the services to God and 
men vv^hich all men ought to perform ; therefore 
he serves for us, or instead of us. 

Jesus Christ bore the sorrows and sins of the 
world in his body and on his sympathy, and 
his love was freighted with it, until his heart 
broke; thus he suffered vicariously for us. 

Jesus Christ voluntarily sacrificed himself in 
entering human relations and enduring human 
experiences and suffering death because of man's 
sin, that he might save that which was lost. 

Our study has brought into clear relief one 
practical truth : — He who would uplift or ennoble 
humanity can do it only by entering into vicari- 
ous relations. Something of himself must be 
given by him who would do for his brother any- 
thing worth doing. The law of sacrifice is the 
law of life. The principle of the Incarnation, 
the higher coming down to the lower and enter- 
ing its circumstances and submitting to its limi- 
tations, is the principle by which all enduring 
progress and moral regenerations are achieved. 
The way of individual salvation and of the 
world's redemption must ever be what a Kempis 
calls "the royal way of the holy cross.'* 

By the humiliation of the Eternal Son of God, 
by his Incarnation into vicarious relationships on 
the earth, by his agony and bloody sweat, by his 



1 82 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

cross and passion, he has honored the eternal law 
of righteousness, exhibited the awful nature of sin, 
shown that the vicarious pathway is the pathway 
of life, in a real sense borne human guilt and 
sorrow, and secured for man what could be se- 
cured in no other way, pardon and peace, because 
in no other way could man be brought to accept 
their conditions. Life out of death, joy out of 
sorrow, holiness out of wickedness, by strength 
stooping to weakness, and innocence taking guilt 
by the hand, — this is a law of the universe. 

Among all on the earth and in spheres of light it 
is the glory of being, to humble itself in service 
and suffering and sacrifice to save being ; and the 
loftier the sphere and the more glorious the 
intelligence, the more gladly is the privilege 
embraced, until, at last, reaching the Supreme 
and Ineffable, in effulgence which no eye can 
endure, in the splendor of infinities and eternities 
where light and love are one, we are brought 
face to face with the throne in the midst of which 
is, as it were, '' a Lamb which had been slain." 



IX. 

The Appeal to Experience. 



' ' There are two very bad things in this resolving of men's 
faith and practice .... into the illumination of such a Spirit 
as they can give no account of, such as does not enlighten their 
reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to 
others. First, it defaces and make useless that part of the im- 
age of God in us, which we call reason ; and secondly, it takes 
away that advantage, which raises Christianity above all other 
religions, that she dares appeal to so solid a faculty." 

— S. T. Coleridge. 

'* Know you not that you will see your feet in fetters when 
you listen not to the admonition of mankind ?" — Sadi. 

*' The earth-lights never lead us beyond the shadows grim, 
And the lone heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Him. 



He gives the witness that excels all argument or sign; 
When we have heard it for ourselves, we know it is divine.' 

— F. R. Havergal. 



IX. 

The Appeal to Experience. 

" That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." 

I John i. 3. 

The writer of the above words was nearly one 
hundred years old. He was the only one of the 
apostolic band who died a natural death. The 
long evening of his life was spent in Ephesus, in 
the midst of almost unparalleled natural beauty. 
On one side were the violet waters of the ^gean 
Sea, and on the other, long ranges of purple 
mountains. During the time spent in Ephesus, 
when all the friends of his youth had died, and 
he alone had seen the sacred face of the Teacher 
of Nazareth, the Gospel and the Epistles which 
bear his name were written. They breathe the 
spirit of Christ. They echo the ^^ Sermon on 
the Mount.'* The first words of the Epistle 
speak of personal experience, and it is this 
fact which has led me to select that passage for 
my text. Before writing about Christ, this 
venerable Apostle tells those whom he ad- 
dresses why he believes in Christ. He appeals 
to the testimony of his personal experience. He 



lS6 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

recognizes no external authority except the 
Master. Jesus had had nothing to commend him 
except what he was. He had antagonized the es- 
tabhshed order. He was poor, humble, a heretic, 
ecclesiastically a criminal. Yet there was some- 
thing about him which so took hold of that un- 
educated fisherman, John, and transformed him, 
that he became one of the teachers of the ages. 
Thus, when John's friends came, as doubtless they 
often did, and asked about the wonderful Teacher, 
how he looked and what he said, and at last why 
he believed him to be indeed the Christ, we can al- 
most see the eyes flash from out the wrinkled face 
and snow-white beard as he answers : " Why do I 
believe in him ? I have seen him ; I have handled 
him ; he was not like unto other men — what I 
have seen and heard I declare unto you." 

Taking his words for our text, we consider to- 
day our reasons for believing in Jesus Christ. 
In proposing this subject, certain suggestions 
and limitations are necessary. 

I say ''our" reasons. That implies that the 
reasons which convince some persons may not have 
weight with others. To expect all to be equally 
impressed by the same evidence would be as 
wise as to expect a nervous and a phlegmatic tem- 
perament to be equally sensitive to the same 
medicine. There are as many evidences of Chris- 
tianity as there are people to be convinced. 

Different ages and varying degrees of intelli- 
gence require different evidence. It may be 



THE APPEAL TO EXPEKIEXCE, 1 8/ 

right or wrong; the fact is that the generation 
which, with comparative unanimity, accepts the 
theory of Evolution in science and philosophy 
must be met with different arguments from former 
ones, that never heard of the newly found principle. 
Our inquiry has nothing to do with the inspira- 
tion of the Bible, or with the interpretation of 
its different texts, or with any '' body of divin- 
ity." These are important — they touch the 
teaching of Christ at many points. But it is not 
of them that we are inquiring. We should have 
a faith so grounded that, if criticism should take 
our Bible all to pieces, it would no more destroy 
Christianity than taking a telescope to pieces 
would destroy the stars. If the Bible were to be 
annihilated, Jesus Christ would remain; if all the 
foundations on which faith has been supposed to 
rest were to be knocked away, the fact would 
not be destroyed that men for eighteen hundred 
years have been born from above to a diviner 
life. Essential Christianity, which is the life of 
God in humanity, is indestructible. Not the less 
tenaciously should we cling to the doctrines 
which are sacred to us ; but we should rise high 
enough to see that what is emphasized in Amer- 
ica is not what receives most emphasis in Ger- 
many ; that to what the Englishman holds most 
dear the Italian or the Indian may give a second- 
ary place, and yet thnt each nationality empha- 
sizes what is most important for it ; while the 
great truths of the Gospel, like mountain ranges, 



155 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

are untouched by the opinions of those who are 
not large enough to see more than one or two 
peaks at a time. 

Although it is true that each generation, pos- 
sibly each individual, may require evidence pecu- 
liar to itself to convince it of the truthfulness of 
Christianity, there can be no doubt that there 
are some reasons which are valid in all genera- 
tions and for all people. It is to those that we 
now turn. Like the Apostle John, we appeal to 
experience. 

We believe in Jesus Christ because of the cor- 
respondence between what he is and what all 
men recognize that they need. 

Is he divine ? That is not our question at this 
time; let that wait. Is he not a mythical char- 
acter? The question is absurd, but never mind, 
— let an answer to that wait. Call Jesus Christ 
by whatever name you please ; fancy that he is 
entirely imaginary ; denounce the Scriptures in 
which his story is told ; but still he alone of all 
who have lived on the earth has brought some 
thing tangible to humanity to meet its universal 
and otherwise inappeasable longings. 

Four questions have been asked everywhere, 
and in all ages: Is there a God? How ought 
man to live? How can the consciousness of 
guilt be appeased ? Does death end all ? These 
questions, and the answers they have received, 
condense the religious history of the world. We 
ask them ourselves. Then we go out among our 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE, 1 89 

neighbors, and find that their hearts are as heavy 
as ours. They ask, What is back of that impen- 
etrable curtain ? What means the consciousness 
that I ought to do right ? Can it be that I, who 
am thrilled with such deathless aspirations, shall 
fall as the leaves fall ? The narrow circle of 
neighborhood is enlarged and observation goes 
abroad, and everywhere, among the throngs of 
cities, in the silence of hamlets, on the remote 
frontiers, where sunny islands sleep beneath 
southern stars, in sight of the awful splendors of 
Himalayan mountains, in the very heart of equa- 
torial Africa, it finds the same longings. It may 
be doubted if a human being lives w^ho does not 
at times ask these four questions with more or 
less distinctness. They are asked everywhere. 
They have been asked in all time. Again we 
start from ourselves, and travel, not out over the 
earth, but backward along the track of history. 
If we stop anywhere for two thousand years, we 
are met by inquirers like ourselves. If we 
read Seneca's *' Morals," we find that it pre- 
sumes God, and asks about human duty ; with 
the same subjects Cicero and Aurelius and Epic- 
tetus were occupied. As I read their words it 
seems to me that I am listening to the voices of 
near friends. Young men put the same questions 
in nearly the same words with these old philoso- 
phers, and the philosophers were as impotent as 
we are. I go further back and read Plato, and 



190 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

find those wonderful dialogues occupied with ex- 
actly the same themes that are studied in our 
colleges and theological seminaries. Do I assert 
too much when I say that all we have of Plato 
and Socrates is chiefly occupied with these four 
questions? — Is there a God? How ought man 
to live? How can a man who has once been 
wrong get right ? Does death end all ? 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said in my hear- 
ing: *^ If the world's library were burning, with 
our Bible and Plato and Shakespeare we v/ould 
save our Plutarch." The sage of Concord named 
four books as great mountain peaks of the world's 
literature. Will any one question that those 
four books are occupied almost altogether with 
the four questions named ? 

But let us get outside of usual lines. The 
study of comparative religion is opening won- 
drous riches in new fields of religious and literary 
inquiry. To-day the Zend Avesta of the ancient 
fire-worshipers and the hymns of the Vedas are 
read almost everywhere. They are filled with 
passages of supernal beauty; they reflect the 
splendor of the eternal mountains ; they breathe 
the fragrance of early dawns ; they are musical 
with voices of ancient songs ; and they are just 
as full of our four questions as are the religious 
poetry and theological literature of Great Britain 
and America in our time. 

Immanuel Kant said that it is the business of 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE. IQI 

philosophy to answer three questions : What 
may I know? What ought I to do ? For what 
may I hope? Attempts to answer those ques- 
tions describe all the world's philosophy, from 
Plato to Herbert Spencer. But those questions 
were stated with equal clearness four thousand 
years ago. One of the oldest of books is the 
poem of Job : I do not wonder that Carlyle 
called it the grandest book ever written by man. 
In that, you find Kant's questions anticipated 
when philosophy as a science was unknown. 
Hear Job: '^ O that I knew where I might find 
Him I" "- How shall a man be just [or right] with 
God ?" '' If a man die, shall he live again ?" The 
philosopher's questions only echo the patriarch's. 
Thus, starting from ourselves and going out- 
ward, we have found that all men everywhere 
are asking the same questions; and starting from 
ourselves and going backward, we have found 
that the same questions have been asked in all 
ages: Is there a God? What ought I to do ? If 
I have done wrong, how can I get right ? Does 
death end all ? These are the eternal voices. 
The one who best answers them will command 
allegiance, whatever his name and wherever he 
comes from. No one else can claim authority 
over us. Consciousness of dependence is forced 
down upon us wuth the weight of worlds. Sor- 
rows sometimes seem the only realities. Death 
keeps creeping closer and closer. Mrs. Browning 
voiced the yearning of the world when she wrote: 



192 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

** We sow the glebe, we reap the corn, 
We build the house where we may rest; 
And then, at moments, suddenly. 
We look up into the great wide sky 
Inquiring wherefore we were born. 
For earnest, or for jest ?" 

There are various answers to our four ques- 
tions. At this time, those of only one Master 
can be considered. Jesus Christ has answered 
them. Let us take up his answers exactly as 
we would consider those of Marcus Aurelius 
or Buddha, and not hesitate to say that if 
Buddha or the great Roman had given the more 
satisfactory answ^ers, we should have followed the 
one w^ho answered our questions best. 

And first as to Deity : Is there a sympathetic 
Person back of all that is visible ? 

In a hospital is a woman without a relative or 
friend. She is in terrible agony. Her body is 
bruised ; her heart is broken. The attendants 
are kind, but she is as lonely as if she were the 
only person in the universe. Day and night 
these questions continually rise : " Is this misery 
endless? Does any one love me enough to cause 
blessing to come out of this agony?" Behind the 
pale face and burning eyes throb these universal 
questions, Jesus Christ met them at the begin- 
ning of his ministry. He seems to have forced 
them into prominence at once : — You ask mx- 
about prayer. All you need to know is this : 
^' After this manner pray ye : Our Father." His 
answer to the first of the w^orld's four questions 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE. 1 93 

is, ^' Our Father." This universe is all the 
Father's house ; all men are the Father's chil- 
dren ; he bears griefs and carries sorrows ; he 
causes all things to work for good. To Kant's 
question, ^' What may I know?" Jesus answers, 
^^Our Father." To Job's wild cry, '' O that I 
knew where I might find Him !" Jesus answers, 
*' He is your Father." 

Why do I believe in Jesus Christ ? I answer, 
first, because he shows our orphaned hearts that 
we are not like driftwood on an infinite ocean ; 
not like wrecks rushing to an abyss ; not like 
enemies who can give pleasure only by being de- 
stroyed ; but the children of a Father who arches 
his heavens in benediction over the evil and the 
good, and causes his mercies to fall like rain on 
the just and the unjust. 

But next : — How ought I to live ? 

This inquiry has been made as eagerly among 
nations in which the name of Jesus was unknown 
as in Christian lands. In all lands men have rec- 
ognized that they ought to do something. There 
has been difference as to what was commanded. 
The Spartans believed that it was right to steal, 
but wrong to be found out. The Hindoo wife 
used to ascend the funeral pyre of her husband 
with as good conscience as that of the Christian 
woman who goes to a missionary society to pray 
for the heathen. Moses justified divorce, and 
Jesus denounced it for all causes save one. All 
teachers and all people recognize that they ought 



194 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

to do what seems to them to be right. The 
ought is universally imperative. Plato and 
Aristotle and Plutarch won immortality by study- 
ing the demands of conscience. Job cried, ^'How 
can a man be just [or right] with God?" Kant 
echoed, ^* What ought I to do?" The philoso- 
phers have answered with w^hole volumes. If 
we had to decide from them, we might as w^ell 
give up. Let any one try to read a book on the 
Metaphysics of Ethics, and see where he would be 
if he were to choose a philosopher for his master. 
Jesus Christ condenses the whole duty of man 
into two sentences : ^^ Love God with all your 
heart. Love your neighbor as yourself." Yes, 
but how shall I treat my neighbor? And who is 
he ? ^^ Do to every one what you w^ould have 
him do to you. Even your so-called enemies 
are your neighbors. If you are no longer in 
doubt, do as I do ; let the mind be in you that is 
in me." 

I meditate on that answer to the world's ques- 
tion : ^^ Do as you would be done by, — be to 
all men Christs" ; and, looking abroad, I find class 
rising against class, laborer crying against capi- 
talist, and capitalist sometimes giving good rea- 
son for the cry ; I find great multitudes living in 
conditions which make decency and virtue im- 
possible ; I hear of the 95,000 families in Berlin 
with only one room for each famiily ; I see the 
long procession of outcast and desolate souls 
drifting hither and thither like leaves blown by 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIEXCE. I95 

autumn winds ; I hear wails of human anguish 
and cries of terrible despair. And then I stop, 
and, just as calmly as is possible, ask a few ques- 
tions. If all men should do as they would be 
done by, would these conflicts continue? If all 
men and women who have strength and lii^ht 
would be Clirists to the outcast and desolate, 
could there be any without some one to save 
them.? If competition to get the better of one 
another would give place to competition to help 
one another, would any suffer? And, some way, 
the impression moves in resistlessly that all we 
need to know about duty is just what Jesus 
Christ, in such simple words, taught the world 
for the first time. 

Why do we believe in Jesus Christ? Because 
he has answered the world's question, What 
ought I to do ? so clearly that a little child can 
understand it, so comipletely that the loftiest 
spirit can never transcend it. 

But : — How can the man who has sinned be 
restored to the place he has lost ? 

This, too, is a world-old question. The con- 
sciousness of guilt is not exclusively an expe- 
rience belonging to Christian lands. Pagans 
realize it. Not far from Keswick, in the lake 
district of England, are the remains of a Druidi- 
cal shrine. In the center is the large stone which 
served as an altar. There animals were slaugh- 
tered ; there, probably, human beings were 
offered in sacrifice. That altar testifies that the 



196 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

race which inhabited Britain before it became a 
Roman province made the attempt to sacrifice 
for sin. On the slopes of the Andes, years ago, a 
strange and awful ceremony was celebrated. On 
a rude stone altar a victim was bound. Around it 
with uncovered heads, chanting weird music, was 
an assembly of worshipers ; by the side of the al- 
tar was a man with grizzled visage, and long robe 
reaching to his feet. The clear blue of the sky 
was unflecked by a cloud. The solemn mountain 
seemed to pierce the heavens above the heads of 
the worshipers. The man beside the altar ap- 
proached it and lifted in the crystalline atmos- 
phere a knife. A gasp, a gurgle, a gushing of 
blood, and a human being ceased to breathe. 
What did it mean ? Some man had committed 
a sin which in their heathenish thought could be 
expiated only by the shedding of blood ; a pris- 
oner taken in battle had been made his substitute. 
There was something in that sinner's breast, and 
in the faith of his people, which demanded satis- 
faction for sin. That tableau upon the mountain 
typifies the history of guilt. Remorse follows 
wrong-doing as man is followed by his shadow. 
It is a universal experience. There is a profound 
reason for the power of the confessional in the 
Romish Church. It practically exists in all 
churches. I have again and again had strong 
men and women confess to me sins that had been 
dead and buried for years; they could not get 
away from their past. In the Uffizzi Gallery in 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIEXCE. 1 97 

Florence there is a marvelous face. In it beauty, 
strength, agony, are magnificent and awful. It 
haunts the memory. It is like the face of an 
insane angel. The hair grows in coils of serpents. 
That !Medusa-head is one of the world's master- 
pieces. It depicts universal experience. Re- 
morse- gnaws like a serpent. When the memory 
is filled with recollections of evil which cannot 
be forgotten, the 3*Iedu5a is its appropriate sym- 
bol. Those men traveling long distances with 
hair shirts, and with sharp nails cutting their feet, 
who are they? Those who have done wrong, 
and who are trying to make up for it by self- 
inflicted suffering. The consciousness of guilt is 
a universal experience. George Eliot pictures 
a man who had committed a horrible crime; his 
after-life was all devoted to working among the 
outcasts. By that he hoped to expiate the sin of 
his youth. 

In all ages, no question has been asked more 
intensely than this : What can I do to escape 
from my guilty past ? What says Jesus Christ 
to this inquiry? '' If you so hate your past that 
you will turn from it and begin anew, all you 
need to do is to believe what I tell you, and to 
follow^ me." 

What shall you do? Do nothing. Stop just 
where you are. You cannot get away from your 
past. Hair shirts, and long pilgrimages, and 
scourges of cactus-briers, and sacrifices, do no 
good. You are trying to appease God. What- 



198 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

ever was needed has been done. The sacrifice 
has all been made. All you need to do is to 
believe what Jesus says, and trust him. You are 
not in the hands of one who is bound to get even 
with you at any cost. You are in your Father's 
hands. He is more anxious to save you than you 
are to be saved. Stop trying to do something, 
and take what he offers you as a free gift. You 
think something ought to be done to expiate 
your guilt? It has been done. The cross on 
Calvary bears witness to that. 

The world is full of those who are crying with 
eager agonizing voices, How can we escape from 
the remorse which ever shadows us ? I lift up 
this simple answer of Jesus, which sounds down 
the centuries with the music of litanies and with 
the inspiration of a divine voice : *^ Him that 
Cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." 
And more than this : I find that simply by 
obeying that voice, simply by trusting and fol- 
lowing Jesus, those who were as dead and foul as 
Lazarus when he had been buried four days 
have come forth to new, beautiful, and benefi- 
cent life. From the slums of cities, from the 
dungeons of prisons, from the forecastles of 
ships, from gambling hells and gin-palaces, from 
the chains and the associations of unutterable vile- 
ness, have come up a great multitude in the coro- 
nation robes of a pure and redeemed humanity; 
and before them, and mingling among them, is 
One whose form is like unto the Son of God. 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE. 1 99 

Why do we believe in Jesus Christ ? Because 
he opens a gate of escape before every human be- 
ing ; and because he brings to bear on human 
hearts the strongest possible motives to induce 
them. to accept the eternal life which is offered 
to all. 

The other day, a beautiful day, when the sun 
was soft, the skies translucent, the air loaded 
with fragrance, I stood with a little company of 
friends in our cemetery. It was a sight often 
seen, and yet one to which w^e can never become 
reconciled. There was the narrow grave, the 
long box, the thuds of falling earth, the mound, 
with flowers which w^ould soon wither. How 
common that sight has become ! What a mys- 
tery ! It was a little child who died yesterday ; 
the day before, a man ; to-morrow, who will it be ? 
And that has been going on for thousands of 
years. Immanuel Kant says it is the business 
of philosophy to answer the question, For what 
may I hope ? And far back in the dawn of his- 
tory. Job, as he pondered the problem, cried : 
" If a man die, shall he live again ?" That is the 
question which will never go down. I ask it ; 
you ask it ; every one asks it. What answer do 
we get ? Put your ear close to the earth that 
holds your loved one: what do you hear? Look 
up into the sky above his grave : what do }^ou 
see ? Ask the sobbing friends around you : 
what do they say? There is a silence broken 
only by the voices of certain teachers in our day 



200 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

who have mustered courage to say : ^^ We don't 
know; there must we leave it/' Is that all? I 
stood by friends the other day when they said 
good-by to a loved one, and I said, '' You are to 
think of that dear one as nearer than ever be- 
fore ; as coming into intimate spiritual contact 
with your spirits." Was I wrong? Ought I to 
have said, ^' We don't know"? What says Jesus 
Christ beside the mystery of death ? Never do 
his words thrill with so sublime a music. Listen : 
^' In my Father's house are many rooms." 
This universe is not simply space dotted with 
worlds held together by invisible attractions. 
Father's house ; many rooms ; dying, going from 
one room into another. Let not your heart be 
troubled ; death is nothing to dread. 

The disciple who wrote our text, who knew 
Jesus better than any other, who thought his 
thoughts after him, has written in majestic 
words about what follows death : "^ They shall 
hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; 
neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. 
For the Lamb which is in the midst of the 
throne shall feed them and shall lead them unto 
living fountains of waters ; and God shall wipe 
away all tears from their eyes." Death, transi- 
tion ; going from one room into another ; being 
where God wipes away all tears as mothers do 
when their children cry; living where light is 
love, — this is the response of that Man of the 
New Testament when we ask, Does death end all ? 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE. 201 

We are now able to answer why we believe in 
Jesus Christ. There are voices in the souls of all 
men which ask imperatively and persistently cer- 
tain questions. They have been pressed in all 
nations and in all ages. No thinking man ever 
lived who was not troubled by them. Their sat- 
isfactory answer will be the world's final religion. 
These are the answers which Jesus Christ brings 
to each of them : Is there a God who can sym- 
pathize with humanity? ^' Yes ; our Father." 
How ought I to live? ^^ Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neigh- 
bor as thyself." But suppose a man has vio- 
lated his conscience and lived a life of terrible 
wickedness, what can he do to find peace and 
joy again? ^^ Leave all your past, and follow 
me." But there is one more question — I almost 
dread to ask it. When death comes, then what ? 
*^ Why, death is only a door from one room into 
another of our Father's house." 

Now, my friends, there are times when we must 
cease to be formal and come close to one another 
and speak from heart to heart. Let me open my 
heart and speak to you. With you, I find myself 
in the midst of mystery. Back of me is dark- 
ness ; before me is the grave ; around me is — I 
know not what. I am in earnest when I ask, 
What am I to believe ? There can be no trifling 
now. There is only one thing which I want, and 
that is — truth. It is not important that I agree 
with you, dearly as I love you ; it is not important 



202 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

that I please any one, much as I may long to do 
so. Only one thing is important, and that is — 
that, if any one can answer the questions which 
arise in my soul, my ears be open to hear him. I 
have tried to lay aside all prejudice and predilec- 
tion. If Buddha answered these questions best, 
I would be a Buddhist. Only one voice even 
pretends to answer them ; but that voice is sym- 
pathetic and clear and absolutely satisfactory. 
Jesus of Nazareth tells me that I am the child of 
the God of eternity ; that to obey him and love 
my fellow-men is the sum of duty ; that when I 
return, a penitent prodigal hating myself, I have 
nothing to do to win God's love, — I have only to 
look up and see him waiting for me with a new 
robe and a kiss ; that when I bury my dead, and 
when I, too, shall have to walk alone down into 
the valley which seems dark, even the darkness 
shall be light about me as I enter into another 
room of my Father's house. I cannot tell you 
by what process I reach my conclusion, but my 
whole nature is satisfied with what Jesus Christ 
brings to me. The Son of Man becomes the Son 
of God. 

*^ It is beautiful, and it would satisfy if it 
were only true." If it were only true! And 
is it more reasonable to think that these voices 
of the universal human heart have no answer? 
Is it more reasonable to think that what uni- 
versally satisfies is only a dream, than to think it 
reality? That cannot be false which the world's 



THE APPEAL TO EXPERIENCE. 203 

heart, in its moments of loftiest exaltation, de- 
clares to be absolutely satisfying. 

Jesus Christ is the key to all problems. Be- 
cause he lives, I believe in the certainty of the 
world's conversion ; because he rnanifests God, 
I can leave all the terrible mysteries of pain 
and sin for the dawning of the brighter light ; 
because he is the One whom the Old Testament 
prophesied and whom the New Testament makes 
known, I believe in the Bible as divine. What 
has Jesus Christ in it m.ust have come down out 
of heaven from God. 

In the future, as in the past, I shall not be 
very particular to present the Jesus of the cate- 
chisms and the creeds, but I shall know no other 
ministry than, according to the measure of ability 
given, to preach the Jesus of the New Testament, 
— so sympathetic that little children ran into his 
arms ; so delicate that he would not make a sin- 
ning woman blush by the gaze of his purity ; so 
direct and faithful that Pharisees were minded 
to kill him ; so human that on the cross he re- 
membered his mother; so divine that he could 
pray even for his murderers ; so full of love that 
he became obedient unto death, even the death 
of the cross, to save those who hated him. 

Jesus Christ, the ever-satisfying answer of God 
to the everlasting hunger of the human heart, — 
this has been the message of the pulpit in the 
past ; and to proclaim the same old truth in form 
adapted to the circumstances and to the natures 



204 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

of those who may listen in the future is all the 
honor that any man need court on the earth. 
After that, 

*' In nobler, sweeter songs 

We'M sing Christ's power to save, 
When these poor, lisping, stammering tongues 
Lie silent in the grave/' 



X. 

The Life, the Light of Men. 



* ' Then first, perhaps, in all the ages, truth, purity, and the 
divine were so represented that by an irresistible enthusiasm the 
corruptest and the wickedest came toward him, and depravity 
bowed itself down and wept in the presence of divinity." 

— H. W. Beecher. 

*' Before Christ, we had heard of God; in Christ we have seen 
him."— Richard Rothe. 

*' Love the Lord and thou shalt see him; do his will and thou 

shalt know 
How the spirit lights the letter, — how a little child may go 
Where the wise and prudent stumble, — how a heavenly glory 

shines 
In his acts of love and mercy, from the gospel's simplest 

lines." — W. M. L. De Wette. 

" Marcus Aurelius and his noble masters have had no lasting 
effect upon the world. Marcus Aurelius left behind him de- 
lightful books, an execrable son, a transitory world. Jesus re- 
mains to humanity an inexhaustible source of moral regenera- 
tions. Philosophy is not enough for the mass. It requires 
sanctity." — Ernest Renan. 



X. 

The Life, The Light of Men. 

"And the life was the light of men." — John i. 4. 

The Gospel of John is a symphony whose 
theme is the Incarnation. One strain runs 
through it from the proem to the account of the 
post-resurrection ministry, — the thought of God 
and man one in Jesus Christ. It is not a philo- 
sophical study nor a divine vision : it is a dec- 
laration concerning the profoundest realities of 
spiritual life. It is the most practical of books. 
Naturally, it was written after the rest of the 
New Testament. There is no indication that 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, Peter, or James had very 
definite ideas about the divinity of Christ. Their 
writings hardly refer to it. It could not have 
been the truth most vividly impressed on their 
minds, or they would have given it more atten- 
tion. There is evidence in the writings of Paul 
that he grasped more of the subject than 
did those who wrote before him ; but he was 
chiefly occupied with two things, — the strug- 
gle of the spiritual and the earthly in individual 
experience, and the extension of the Kingdom. 
Distance was required for the divinity to be seen 
and appreciated. It was reserved for that dis- 



208 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

ciple who lived longest, and who had much time 
for meditation ^^ in the long evening of his life," 
to develop and declare, in all the majesty of his 
marvelous diction and the splendor of his matclv 
less style, the superlative fact that this Man with 
whom he had associated, and by w^hom he had 
been inspired, was also in the beginning with 
God. When the words and works of our Master 
were seen apart from the malice and malignity of 
his environment, their divine character appeared. 
The doctrine of the Incarnation was first fully 
and authoritatively declared in the waitings of 
St. John. 

Our text is one strain from the prelude of this 
theme, in the first chapter of John. The Apos- 
tle reaches back into eternity at once : the Word 
was with God ; He v/as God, in that dateless period 
which can only be called '^ beginning ;*' the world 
was made by Him. Then, as if to separate this 
truth from any possible identification with a phys- 
ical process, he says: ** In Him was life;" and 
reaching from the beginning to his own time, he 
declares: ^*And the life was the light of men." 
Yes, Christ was the divine Word ; he was in 
the beginning with God ; he was the light of 
men. 

In all ages there has been longing for light. 
The symbolism of the fire-worshipers, who wor- 
shiped the sun, moon, and stars, was an expres- 
sion of this universal longing. The great light 
naturally represented the great God, and there- 



THE LIGHT OF MEN. 2O9 

fore the sun has received adoration from mill- 
ions of worshipers. The cry of the centuries 
was expressed in the last words of Goethe : 
'' More light !" The Apostle John, in the midst 
of his sublime declaration concerning our Lord's 
divinity, declares that He was the light for which 
the world had waited. Let us consider that 
utterance. 

What is light ? A scientific definition may not 
be possible even yet, and it is not necessary. 
The first and, to us, most prominent ofifice of 
light is to make other things visible ; but itself is 
never seen. A mountain, a waterfall, a man, are 
seen ; and yet, although light is not visible, if 
there is no light, nothing is seen. The real mis- 
sion of Christ was not to call attention to itself, 
but to make it possible for men to see God ; just 
as the mission of a telescope is not to call at- 
tention to the fineness of its case or the finish of 
its glass, but to bring the sun and stars within 
the reach of human eyes. 

In all God's dealings with man, he adapts 
himself to man. When he would speak to men, 
he uses human language and speaks through 
men. When he wishes to reveal his truth in 
permanent form, he moves holy men to write our 
Bible. When he wishes to draw men to him, and 
to disclose himself in the royalty of his life, he is 
manifested through a human form, which lives a 
human life, dies, and is buried. The culmination 
of this principle of adaptation is in Jesus Christ. 



2IO SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

There is nothing abstract in the Bible ; it is 
the most picturesque and concrete of books. Its 
profoundest lessons are not taught in proposi- 
tions. Logic can be made to prove anything ; 
propositions can be multiplied according to in- 
genuity ; philosophy soon gets beyond the reach 
of common people. Nothing is so easily compre- 
hensible as life. Even the Serm.on on the Mount 
is the subject of controversy ; but a man who 
lives Christ is seen to be a Christian, even though 
his tongue may fail to articulate his creed. The 
light makes Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, 
the purple lakes and the fertile vineyards, visible ; 
and the life which our Master lived makes beauti- 
ful and clear facts in the world of spirit which 
otherwise had remained unknown and inaccessible, 
like mountains at midnight. 

This Life then throws light, first, on the person 
of the Deity. God can never be fully understood 
or comprehended. Those who have meditated 
most upon the subject have most been baffled by 
it. It is hard for scientific men to realize the di- 
vine Personality because they are so overwhelmed 
with the greatness of nature, that, when any at- 
tempt is made to rise to its Author, even im- 
agination sinks with nerveless wing. Unrevealed, 
God is the abyss out of which all things visible 
have come. He is the Infinite, the One of whom 
nothing can be definitely known. The heavens 
declare his glory, but who he is, and how he 
exists, and what are his methods of operation, 



THE LIGHT OF MEN, 211 

are beyond the reach of thought. A few catch 
ghmpses of him in nature, but to most he is 
simply the Unknown, the Unapproachable, the 
Infinite. Philosophy is the search for God. It 
has condensed the results of its search into four 
words: — the Absolute; the Unconditioned; the 
Unknowable ; the Power not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness. When one of the great- 
est of modern philosophers speaks of God as the 
Unknowable, he honestly and fairly acknowledges 
that he is facing a power which he must recog- 
nize because of \vhat is visible, but of which he 
can know nothing. If we turn away from revela- 
tion and simply commune with our own thoughts, 
we must, in view of the greatness of the universe, 
adopt the word '^Unknowable" in place of: '^ I 
believe in God the Father Almighty.'' Phi- 
losophy is prostrate before the darkness ; but the 
Life pours light on the mystery. In Jesus Christ 
the Unknowable is made known. All there is 
of God is not revealed, for such a revelation could 
be appreciated only by a being as great as God ; 
but all of God that humanity needs is made 
known. When one enters a mine, he goes into 
absolute blackness ; he cannot see an inch from 
his eyes. But the guide does not leave him 
in darkness. He puts into his hands a candle. 
By that he can find his way anywhere. It 
will reveal the hiding-place of the gold ; it will 
show the ribs of the mountain ; it will throw its 
beams full in the face^ of those going with him. 



212 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

It does not show him all the mazes of the mine, 
but all that he needs to see. The Life does not 
show us all there is of God, but does show us all 
we need to know of him for our earthly existence. 
What is God like? He is like Jesus Christ. In 
all that our Lord was, and said, and did, we are 
shown God, — ^^the brightness of the Father's 
glory.'* Jesus Christ, from the beginning to the 
end of his ministry, went about doing good. He 
sought to save the lost. It was all a work of 
salvation. He healed diseases, thus manifesting 
his interest in the temporal as well as the eternal 
life of man. He took little children in his arms, 
showing that childhood was as sacred as man- 
hood. He was considerate of the outcast, those 
who had fallen from virtue and respectability. 
He went so far as to make the first announce- 
ment of his Messiahship to a disreputable woman. 
He called a publican to be one of his disciples 
and the writer of one of his Gospels. He was 
careful to distinguish between the sin of arro- 
gance and the sin of weakness, between selfish- 
ness and frailty. He denounced Pharisees to 
their faces, and yet simply said to the woman 
more sinned against than sinning : " Neither do I 
condemn thee. Go, and sin no more." He did 
not blame Peter for denying him ; he simply 
looked at him, with a look that brought the 
denier to his senses. He did not make the mis- 
take of blaming the officials who crucified him, 
knowing well that they were the tools of a system 



THE LIGHT OF MEN. 213 

which would soon fall ; he prayed for them. He 
wept with Mary and Martha. He manifested his 
power whenever he could help, but never to win 
praise. Just before the end of his unique career, 
he said : '' He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." 

Let us try to translate this : — ^^ You wonder 
what God is like : you see in me the answer to 
your question. In all his dealings with human- 
ity, God, both in feeling and action, is to his chil- 
dren w^hat I am to you. You are broken-hearted 
because death has robbed you of your treasures, 
and ask, * Does God care for me ? ' Did you not 
see me weeping at the grave of Lazarus ? You 
have committed a terrible sin ; society shuts you 
out ; the world crushes you ; no one cares for you. 
Did not I say to the sinning woman. Go, and sin 
no more ? You say, ^ There is no place for me in 
this great thrilling modern life.' But did I not 
bless even the children ? Your work maybe only 
a child's work, but it is precious to me." 

One may even cry, "' I have committed a crime 
that can never be forgiven; life, death, eternity, are 
equally terrible. If I might die forever, it would 
be the only heaven I could ask." To such, there 
sounds the divine prayer on the cross : ^' Father, 
forgive them," — they have crucified me, but for- 
give even them. And this is the answer of Christ 
to those who think there is no pardon for them. 

I do not care to try to interpret that life. It 
is its own best interpreter. If I can onl\- bring 



214 SPIRIT AND IIFE, 

home to any one, with a Httle more force than it 
had before, this one radiant fact, that God in 
eternity is made known in the earthly career of 
Jesus Christ, my ministry will be complete. 
The longer I live the more I see that men are 
hungry for God. They do not know him ; they 
are in the dark ; they are desperate and despair- 
ing ; they do not know themselves, but they are 
hungry for God. Even as sometimes we are 
weary, and discouraged, and out of temper, and 
broken-hearted, and do not know that we hunger. 

Dear friends, this is the one great message ; 
the old story that never wears out; the music 
that grows sweeter with the singing; the truth 
that makes life worth living: that, in all our joys 
and sorrows, in our sins, our conflicts, our defeats, 
our aspirations for better things, when calamity 
crashes into the palace of our hopes, when we close 
the eyes of those dearer than life, when we go 
through the valley of the shadow ourselves, and 
throughout the eternities, we are in the hands of 
him who stands before us radiant and glorious in 
the light that is poured from the Life. 

In the light of the Life, the true nature also of 
Christianity appears. What is it to be a Chris- 
tian? The frequency with which this question is 
asked is a mournful testimony to the fact that, in 
trying to get to Christ, men have gone away from 
him. Christ is Christianity. If a man who had 
never heard of any of the religions of the world 
were to ask us for the most concise and definite 



THE LIGHT OF MEN, 21$ 

definition of Christianity, could any better an- 
swer be given than is seen in Christ ? A man, so 
far as he has the hfe of Christ, — Hves from the 
motives and seeks the ideals of Christ, — is a 
Christian. 

Our Lord taught great lessons concerning duty, 
but all that he taught he lived. What are some 
of the key-words of his teaching? The first is 
^* Father." Live as if God Vv^ere your Father. 
Another is, ''Let him that is the chiefest among 
you be servant of all." Another is, '-' He that 
loseth his life shall find it." Another is, ''Tell 
others the message that I have told you ; go into 
all the world and preach the gospel." All his 
teaching he gathered into two sentences: "Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. 
Ye shall love one another as I have loved you." 
If these lessons had been only moral maxims, 
they would still be the loftiest ever uttered; but 
they would not have half their power. It is not 
because the moral maxims of Jesus are so much 
nobler than those of Socrates and Buddha that he 
is the world's Saviour. Much that he taught is 
written in the very constitution of the universe 
and illustrated in the processes of history. 
There have been in all ages elect souls who have 
comprehended these truths more or less clearly, 
but none of them have embodied the truths in life. 
That which makes Jesus unique is that his teach- 
ings are inseparable from his life. He never put 
into words one precept which has not a fuller and 



2l6 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

more beautiful expression in what he did. Con- 
sequently Christ is Christianity. To understand 
the system, we can only study it in the light of the 
Life ; it cannot be understood apart from that. 

Jesus lived in daily intercourse with his Father. 
When a boy, he said : '' Wist ye not that I must 
be about my Father's business?" When he was 
dying, he said: '* Father, into thy hands I com- 
mend my spirit." With him, the invisible was 
not impersonal and unknowable ; the unseen 
powers were the personal Father. His whole 
career was one of service. He was the Lord of 
glory, and yet he healed diseases, fed the hungry, 
washed the disciples' feet. He was servant of all. 
And his followers must follow in his footsteps. 
Honors are for the world. Applause, offices, 
public honors, are for self-seekers. Christ never 
sought anything for himiself but the opportunity 
to do good. He was the servant of those who 
were too poor to pay Avages and too wicked to 
appreciate sacrifice. Who are the Christians to- 
day? Those w^ho are violently defending dogmas 
they do not understand, or those who, without 
self-exaltation, are ministering to the w^eak and 
the poor? '^Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them," is 
truly the Golden Rule ; and, if anything more 
precious than gold is ever found, let us give it 
that name. But what are the words compared 
w^ith the Life? He was abused, misrepresented, 
treated like a dog, and yet there is not a single 



THE LIGHT OF MEN. 21/ 

instance recorded, in which he allowed it to make 
the slightest difference in his treatment of others. 
He always did for them according to their needs 
and not according to what they gave him. They 
reviled him ; he blessed them. They followed 
him out of curiosity ; he fed them when they 
were hungry. They spit upon him, whipped him 
until his back was raw and bleeding ; and he, 
looking beyond the passions of the moment and 
discerning souls to be saved, prayed for their for- 
giveness. The only true place to study the 
Golden Rule is beside the cross. Christ, dying 
to save those who hated him, condenses the 
Golden Rule. For think: if we are in the hands 
of One who sees that we are deceiving ourselves 
and being impelled by passion instead of guided 
by principle, do we not wish that that One should 
do by us according to his wisdom, and not accord- 
ing to our blindness? He was the living Golden 
Rule. 

And so we might consider his sayings one by 
one. All were alive in him. His presence preached 
the Gospel wherever he went. The music was 
always keyed to the two notes of Fatherhood and 
Brotherhood ; it was condensed in one word — 
Love : love to God the Father, love to man the 
brother. ^'As I have loved you." Who shall 
measure that love ! Death is the only word that 
hints at its reach, and that points to depths un- 
utterable. What is Christianity? The creed of 
a church, — Congregational, Presbyterian, Episco- 



2lS SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

palian, Roman Catholic ? No, these are only dry 
bones. Where shall we take the inquirer who 
really wants to know w^hat Christianity is ? To 
the ecclesiastical assemblies where multitudes are 
competing for offices and fame? To the tribunals 
where poor, puny, egotistical men are arraigning 
one another because the pure light of God does 
not look the same when it shines through glasses 
of different colors ? No : these workers may be 
very earnest, but for some reason they do not 
look like Christ and will not help our inquirer. Let 
us take him into the presence of the Life, let us 
show him the One who, from first to last, never 
sought an honor, never asked for a vote, never 
was on a committee ; who, wherever he went, was 
searching eagerly and constantly for those whom 
he could help ; Vv^ho never asked appreciation ; 
who did his best work for those who abused him 
most ; who never judged men by their moods but 
always by their needs ; who had sympathy for the 
sorrowing, food for the starving, help for the faint- 
ing, hope for the despairing ; who asked no pay 
for anything he did ; who was so in earnest that, 
when it came to the question, " Shall I continue 
this work and die, or give it up?" he hesitated 
not a moment, but welcomed death if he could 
give life to the perishing. There will we take 
our inquirer, and say: Turn away from the best 
of us, disciples ; we are as weak as you are ; we 
are selfish ; we often mistake passion for principle. 
Look to him who not only teaches Christianity, 



THE LIGHT OF ME.V. 219 

but who is Christianity. That is the life for 
which we are striving. Judge Christianity by 
what it is seen to be in the hght of that Life. 

In the Life is seen, too, the Kingdom of God. 
Jesus said : '' The kingdom of God is among you." 
The people did not understand that he was that 
Kingdom, and that, wherever he went, it had exist- 
ence and power. And yet that was what he meant. 
He said the Kingdom should grow like the 
mustard seed and like the leaven, that at last it 
should fill the earth. What he meant by the 
Kingdom has been the subject of endless discus- 
sion. It has been interpreted as a principle of 
sovereignty — as a literal empire Vv'hich should 
endure for a thousand years. There is, however, 
a simpler and more credible explanation : He was 
the Kingdom. As men received the inspiration of 
his life, it was within them ; as they became one 
with him, it was extended. It is larger to-day than 
ever ; it will fill the earth simply because it is life. 
It is not possible that His sway should not some 
time fill the earth, because men cannot realize that 
for which they were made without becoming like 
him. He is the goal of humanity. He realizes that 
which is best in men ; that which is best must 
some^time conquer that which is worst. In individ- 
uals this principle may seem to fail, but it does not 
fail when applied to the race. And when his 
Kingdom has come, then what ? All men will be 
hke Christ, — swayed by the same motives, working 
toward the same ends, looking toward the same 
Father. What a glory halos the thought that 



220 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

some time the whole creation^ which has been 
groaning in pain will become the abode of that 
Humanity which at last realizes the end for which 
it was created, and will become, not simply in in- 
dividuals, but corporately, the very temple of God ! 
This is what the Life prophesies ; this is what the 
Life is. When the Kingdom prevails, all men will 
be what Christ is; and the dream of Isaiah, which 
in those barbaric times must have seemed like the 
hallucination of lunacy, will be no more a dream : — 
there shall be none to hurt nor destroy in all God's 
holy mountain. This is the prayer we offer when 
we pray, *'Thy kingdom come;'* we ask for the 
hastening of the day in which all men shall be 
one with Christ as he is one with God. That 
day is far off, no doubt ; but what is time, as we 
measure it, to Him who inhabits eternity.^ A 
day of our life would be an eternity to the tiny 
creatures whose existence is completed in a mo- 
ment. A day of God's time may seem eternity 
to us. That which appears to be so far away as to 
be impossible to you and me may be on the verge 
of accomplishment with him to whom a thousand 
years is as a day. But whether near or far, he is the 
Kingdom of God. When we see him ministering 
to the sick, feeding the hungry, weeping with the 
sorrowing, dying a ransom for the sinning, we see 
what men will have become when the Kingdom 
fills the earth. The vision overwhelms with its 
splendor ! A world with all like Christ — it is 
surely coming ! The Life is the light in which its 
glory is manifested. 



THE LIGHl^ OF MEN, 221 

The Life is the hght of men. Light is that 
which makes all things visible. Jesus Christ is 
the light of the world. In him we see what must 
otherwise have been an inscrutable mystery — 
the nature of God, made so plain that a little 
child can pray ^^ Our Father"; he is Christianity, 
and those who see him see it ; in him the future 
kingdom of God stands before our eyes, with a 
splendor as distinct as that of Mont Blanc to 
those who look upon it when its fields of glitter- 
ing white are bathed in sunlight from a cloudless 
sky. 

Contact with life inspires life. A candle touched 
by a flame is always lighted. If our lives are 
barren and dead, let us put them into contact 
with the Life that cannot die ; if our minds' are 
dark and we walk in a universe of blackness, let 
us bring the little candles of our thought where 
the light of the Life can touch them, and they 
will blaze with a light sufficient for our need. 

The sum of the whole matter is this: If you 
want to know about God, you might as well try 
to explore the midnight by looking at it as by 
searching to find him out. See him in Christ. If 
you want to know what Christianity is, turn from 
all books and creeds and systems of thought, 
good and helpful as these may be, and see Chris- 
tianity in Christ. If you want to know what the 
Kingdom is which is to fill the earth, you may 
learn by becoming acquainted with Christ. His 
Life is the licrht of men. 



XL 

The Invisible Realm. 



*' The foundations of a faith in a future life lie outside of Rev- 
elation, and ought, therefore, to be disclosed independently of 

it It is immortality which gives promise of Revelation, 

not Revelation v>^hich lays in our own constitution and in the 
government of God the foundations of immortality." — John 
Bascom, D.D. 

** So Life must live, and Soul must sail, 
And Unseen over Seen prevail; 
And all God's argosies come to shore, 
Let ocean smiJe, or rage, or roar." 

— D. A. Wasson. 

" We bow our heads 
At going out, we thin!:, and enter straight 
Another golden chamber of the King's, 
Larger than this we leave, and lovelier." Anon. 

** If mind is extinguished on the dissolution of the body, it is 
the only force known to us as being absolutely annihilated." 

— James McCosh, D.D. 

*' But as we are conscious that we are endued with capacities 
of perception and of action, and are living persons; what we are 
to go upon is, that we shall continue so till we foresee some acci- 
dent, or event, which will endanger those capacities, or be likely 
to destroy us; which death does in no wise appear to be. . . . 
When we go out of this world, we may pass into new scenes, 
and a new state of life and action, just as naturally as we came 
into the present." — Bishop Butler. 

*' How we rejoice, at the close of a long life, to think that we 
shall soon enter upon an entirely new career !" — Richard 

ROTHE. 



XL 

The Invisible Realm. 

**For this corruptible must put on incorruption." — Cor, xv. 53. 

Men are always most impressed by their 
troubles. A little darkness will obscure the sun. 
Sorrows make faith difificult. Death leaves a 
deeper impression than life. Although it is 
often the swiftest of experiences, one which is 
over in an instant, yet it always startles. It will 
surprise to-morrow as it did yesterday. Civiliza- 
tion has made death more dreaded. In rude 
ages people threw away life; in cultured times 
they hold it sacred. Each man, as he comes to 
maturity, faces this mystery as eagerly as if no 
one had ever questioned it before. It is as new 
to us as it was to Job ; it will be as new to our 
children's children as to us. What must death 
have been to the first person who ever saw its ef- 
fects I If no one had ever died, and our best be- 
loved should cease to breathe, what havoc would 
be w^orked in thought ! We think about these 
things, talk about them, shrink from them ; 
but the dark curtain which shuts us in never 
parts. Lazarus revealed no secrets. No trav- 
eler from the unseen has reached our shores. 
And so it comes to pass that, on this Easter day 



226 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-eight of 
the Christian era, men are, of themselves, as 
bhnd and yet as anxious to see as they have 
ever been. 

But we are not left to ourselves. We are dis- 
ciples of One whose whole ministry hinged on 
his revelation of the reality beyond death. 
We gather to-day with great hope. We have 
buried our dead, and our hearts have reached out 
into the unseen and been strong. We front the eter- 
nal mystery with submission and with something 
of longing, because he has taught us that the 
universe is our Father's house, and that death is 
only a door into another room of that house. 
This is a subject upon which we naturally and 
properly crave all the light we can get. When 
the most trustful have listened to the words of 
the Master, they ask : — And are there any other 
voices on the subject ? If we think of the Bible 
as from God, and the constitution of the human 
soul and the universe itself as belonging to the 
devil, then we must study only the Bible ; but, if 
we recognize that the constitution of the soul 
is from God, and that the universe in every part 
is also and truly a revelation of him, then we 
shall with equal earnestness study the testimony 
of these also. The divine revelation is in three 
volumes. All have much to say on the subject, 
and each corroborates the teaching of the others. 

The Apostle speaks positively and gloriously 
concerning the unseen. Death is the gate into a 



THE INVISIBLE REALM. 22/ 

realm which disease never invades. '^The last 
enemy which shall be abolished is death/* 
" This mortal must put on immortality/' ^' This 
corruptible must put on incorruption/' These 
physical bodies are not to be re-animated ; for 
St. Paul expressly says: ^^ It is sown a natural 
body, it is raised a spiritual body." The physi- 
cal body can have no place in an immaterial 
state ; but, on the other hand, it is impossible to 
think of existence without form. Therefore we 
are told : ^^ There is a spiritual body" — a form 
through which each individual expresses himself 
forever. Words are the bodies of thoughts, 
and exist in our minds before we speak. The 
thought unexpressed in the mind has a spiritual 
body ; when it is voiced, it has a natural body. 
A personality cannot be imagined except in 
form. The form in which it will be clothed 
hereafter is its spiritual body. The spiritual 
word is manifest through the spoken w^ord ; and 
so the spiritual body manifests itself through the 
physical form to beings who are dependent on 
senses. 

But consider : Suppose you and I had the 
power to read thoughts : suppose we were not 
dependent upon our senses. We are sitting 
with a friend who thinks certain lines of Tenny- 
son. He does not speak the words, but they ex- 
ist in thought ; and, as we have the power of read- 
ing thought, we know what the man's spirit is 
saying. 



228 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

Take the sense of seeing. The real man is not 
the body. The body does nothing. If the un- 
seen man is in one mood, the body will do one 
thing, and, if in another mood, something else. 
You may sit by a man all day and see his body 
every moment, and still not know what he is 
thinking, whom he is loving, and what he is 
purposing. When, however, the unseen man 
chooses, he can manifest himself through his body, 
and what the body does can be seen. Let us 
suppose that you have a sense so keen that you 
do not need physical manifestation of others' 
moods : would you not still see a form ? It would 
be a man angry, a man loving, a man choosing. 
Anger, apart from a person, has no existence. 
When the Apostle says, '* It is sown in corrup- 
tion, it is raised in incorruption " he only means 
that before death men are compelled to use a de- 
caying physical body to express themselves ; but 
that when death has done its work, the man is 
free from all that decays, — he can be himself. 
He will still have a body, for form is necessary 
to existence. But he will not need to speak 
words as we do now, for spirit can take knowl- 
edge of spirit ; and his body will not be made 
of stuff that decays, but will be the man think- 
ing, loving, choosing, independent of voice and 
flesh. This teaching of the Apostle harmonizes 
with what is known of man in his spiritual 
nature. The spiritual nature is as real and de- 
monstrable as the physical. Just here, however, 



THE INVISIBLE REALM, 229 

arises a question which it is the main purpose 
of this sermon to answer : 

Is there any reason, apart from the Bible, for 
belief in an unseen universe where the spirit 
within us can continue to exist? We recognize 
the spiritual in ourselves, — that the real power 
in us is something which uses the body and is 
not used by it : now, if that power ever gets out 
of the body, is there any place for it ? 

The visible universe had a beginning. There 
may be a question as to whether matter was 
created out of nothing; but science and the Bible 
agree that there was a time when the present 
universe had no existence. "' And the earth was 
without form and void, and darkness dwelt upon 
the face of the deep." Of that timeless period 
before creation, who knows anything? And yet 
it is distinctly indicated. Once chaos reigned — 
darkness on the face of the deep. How long the 
universe has been in its present form, few specu- 
late ; but all reputable thinkers agree that its 
present perfection is the result of a long process, 
and that the time once was when, instead of our 
sun and the attendant planets, — perhaps instead 
of all the stars and suns, — there was '^a diffused 
or chaotic state in which the various particles 
were widely separated from one another, but ex- 
erting on one another gravitating force, and 
therefore possessed of potential energy." ^ The 

* " The Unseen Universe," pp. 163-4. 



230 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

Bible speaks of a time when the earth was with- 
out form ; science speaks of the time when the 
visible universe was formless, diffused like vapor. 
It is not for us to enter into any discussion of 
this subject. Definite thoughts are impossible 
upon certain themes. It is enough to know that 
both revelation and human investigation point 
toward a time when all that is visible w^as invisi- 
ble. How it became visible may never be known ; 
but out of the one came the other. The invisi- 
ble w^as a palace of light, so vast that no one 
ever dreamed how large it was, so bright that no 
eye could gaze upon it, so high that its summit 
was lost, so deep that its foundations could never 
be discovered. Of that palace only one thing is 
known. Some time before eye of mortal was 
opened to sight its doors were unbarred, and out 
through them came what now^ is visible — the 
earth, the planets, the fixed stars ; out of the 
palace of the unseen came the substances which 
have their present form. The previous state of 
all things must have been as real as their present 
state, the unseen as real as the seen. What 
forces dwelt in that eternity, who can tell ? This, 
however, the blindest can see : there must have 
been intelligence, and will, and love, — there must 
have been life in some form, or else there would 
be no life here. Life cannot come from death, 
although it can survive it. We go backw^ard 
with our Bible in one hand and Science in the 
other. Both lead to a time when the present 



THE IX VISIBLE REALM. 23 1 

order began ; both to the insufferable Hght in 
which all things are invisible ; both to the neces- 
sary thought that, as there are life, will, love, 
thought, here, there must have been life, Avill, 
love, thought, there. In other words, things 
which are seen tell of an unseen universe in the 
past out of which the present issued, and in 
which all that distinguishes humanity, except 
the physical body, had existence. This opens a 
wide door; it shows us, when we stand dumb by 
the graves of our loved ones and wonder whether 
the spirit can exist apart from the body, that in 
the beginning, before any physical universe ex- 
isted, life, spirit, love, thought — all that distin- 
guishes personality — must have been as real as 
to-day. 

Holy Scripture points not only to a beginning, 
but to an end of the present order. Science 
points in the same direction. ^^ The earth will 
gradually lose its energy of rotation, as well as 
that of revolution, around the sun. The sun 
itself will wax dim and become useless as a source 
of energy, until at last the favorable conditions 
of the present solar system will have quite dis- 
appeared. But what happens to our system will 
happen likewise to the whole visible universe, 
which will, if finite, become in time a lifeless 
mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter disso- 
lution. In fine, it will become old and effete 
no less truly than the individual — it is a glorious 
garment, this visible universe, but not an immor- 



232 SPIRIT AND IIFE. 

tal one — we must look elsewhere if we are to 
be '' clothed with immortality as with a gar- 
ment.""^ The visible universe is to fade from 
sight, all that it contains of beauty of form and 
splendor of color is to disappear. Some time it 
will sail in the ether, a cold and desolate mass, 
until new transformation occurs ; perhaps until it 
is drawm into collision with some other mass, 
when the force of colliding will cause a new 
conflagration and the words of Scripture be veri- 
fied : ^* The elements shall melt with fervent heat." 

When our eyes are turned toward that future, 
we face the fact that nothing is ever destroyed. 
The melting of the elements will be only a 
change of form. Conservation of energy is a 
recognized law. The form of matter will change 
— the energy will simply exist in other forms. 
There is no more reason to think that life and 
all that constitutes personality will have ceased 
when the universe is once more without form, 
than to think that they had no existence in the 
beginning. All visible things are gradually mov- 
ing toward the unseen. Some time the systems 
will no more swing in space ; the elements will 
have melted, and possibly the reign of ancient 
chaos will be resumed. Toward that palace of 
light all things are tending, and by and by they 
will disappear in the insufferable brightness. 

But life, love, thought, and will were in the 

* "The Unseen Universe/' p. 196. 



THE INVISIBLE REALM. 233 

earlier palace — why not in the later? We can only 
inquire : we do not know. But we have great 
longings. At the door of this palace all the gen- 
erations have knocked. Mothers have seen 
their babes go into it, and have cried, '^ Do they 
still live?" Husbands have parted from wives, 
wives from husbands, and friend from friend ; 
and no one ever went into it who did not leave 
behind some one listening at the door, in the 
hope that he might catch the rustling of a robe, 
or the echo of a voice. To the palace which 
each one enters at death, all things visible are 
hurrying. What is it ? A void, a vacancy, a non- 
entity? Science says there is no void ; the invisible 
is never empty ; in the elder chaos, intelligence 
and will had their abode. But here science ceases 
to speak, and the voice that now sounds through 
the silence is that of the Author of Christianity. It 
is the only voice. Longings are everywhere, but 
there is only one answer. It is the answer of 
Him v/ho, having died as others die, made his 
spiritual body evident to those who were usually 
able to see only physical things. He said : "" In 
my Father's house are many mansions," — that 
is, in the universe of God there is not only the 
visible but the invisible also, — '' if it were not so, 
I would have told you." The vision given to 
the beloved disciple was of things unseen by 
fleshly eyes, and is chiefly a revelation by nega- 
tives. There shall be no pain there, no hunger, 
no sin, no weariness, no death, no tears, nothing 



234 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

that flesh is heir to. Thus again the Book and 
Science are in agreement, — or rather the Book 
takes up the strain where Science is compelled 
to drop it ; and as we read, there sweep in upon 
us hints of a sublimer harmony in which are 
songs and harpers harping, and voices as of many 
waters, and great and marvelous music. The 
universal human heart longs, with inappeasable 
longings, to know what lies in the region beyond 
the grave. Science answers : I do not know ; I 
only know that there is no vacancy anywhere, that 
no littlest energy can ever be destroyed ; it may 
be transformed, but it can never be lost. I do 
not know what lies beyond, but I do know 
that life, love, thought, and will must have ex- 
isted in the unseen universe from which all things 
seen have issued, and there is not the slightest 
evidence for thinking that they will cease in the 
unseen to which we are hastening. Having 
found that the unseen has been and must be a 
state in which energy exists, in*which life, love, 
thought, and will have existed and presumptively 
wall continue, we are at last ready to listen to 
the voice which harmonizes with all that is 
known of human longing and human experience 
and with the universe itself: ^^ It is sown in cor- 
ruption, it is raised in incorruption ; it is sown a 
natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.'' 

Another question haunts our thought. Is 
everything that exists visible to physical eyes, or 
is there now all about us an unseen universe? 



THE INVISIBLE REALM. 235 

Was this palace of light destroyed when all that 
could be made visible to humanity issued into 
bodily expression ? That the things seen came 
from the unseen is evident enough ; but did all 
that existed come into expression ; or may we think 
that now% coincident vv^ith everything seen, there 
is another kingdom in which, to mortals, every- 
thing is unseen ? Have you never, in the silence of 
your own thought, wondered whether there might 
not be invisible eyes looking upon you? Have 
you not sometimes thought that influences came 
to you which were not of earth, and yet were 
not directly from God ? '^ My mother has seemed 
nearer to me since she died than she ever did in 
life," were words spoken by one whose memory 
is sacred to me. " We both realized that we 
were nearer to each other than we had ever been 
before," was the utterance of a strong, thought- 
ful man who had seen eyes that were dear to 
him close forever. Have you never had some 
such experience ? At least have you not often 
wondered whether there might not be beings in 
the air whose existence was as real as yours, but 
whom you could not see? These inquiries force 
the question. Is the unseen universe a present 
reality? To this there are various answers, only 
a few of which can be given. 

There is the answer of Science. ^' We are 
thus led to believe that there exists now an in- 
visible order of things intimately connected with 
the present, and capable of acting energeticall}' 



236 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

upon it ; for, in truth, the energy of the present 
system is to be looked upon as originally derived 
from the invisible universe, while the forces 
which give rise to transmutations of energy 
probably take their origin in the same region.""^ 
In other words, while we go backward to find 
whence energy and physical form first issued, we 
cannot help noticing that things are constantly 
changing and that the causes of the changes 
elude us. Where does the force come from 
which works change now ? 

An illustration is that of the organ of memory. 
Physiologists tell us that each specific thought 
denotes some specific w^aste of brain-matter, so 
that there is a mysterious and obscure connection 
between the nature of the thought and that of 
the waste which it occasions. *' In like manner 
memory is looked upon as dependent upon traces 
left behind in the brain, of the state in which it 
was when the sensation remembered took place. "f 
You cannot think a thought without that invisi- 
ble, intangible something making an impression 
on the matter of the body. That is, the invisi- 
ble and spiritual can affect even matter as much 
as if we were to say — as we do — that a thought 
strikes us. And thought, whatever it is, is started 
in the unseen ; it affects both the unseen which 
thinks and the seen which acts. Thus the sim- 
ple fact ot memory is an illustration of the 

* ''The Unseen Universe/' p. 199. \ Ibid., p.p. 77, 78. 



THE INVISIBLE REALM. 237 

material world influenced and changed by the 
spiritual. 

But changes are constantly in progress. In 
the limits of a sermon they can neither be traced 
nor illustrated. Suffice it to say that '' what we 
are driven to is not an under-life resident in the 
atom, but a divine over-life in which we live and 
move and have our being." "^ The forces which 
cause the changes in the universe, — whence are 
they ? All from the unseen. There is, beyond 
sight, a realm in which activity is possible now, 
a realm from which issue the orders which all 
visible things obey. What it is we are not told, 
but that it exists we can have no doubt. 

When to the above is added different evidence, 
the conviction is immeasurably stronger. As we 
study history, we are conscious that occasionally 
there have been great irruptions of power which 
have caused changes in thought and conduct so 
vast as to be called revolutions. Men are sub- 
stantially alike in all ages ; subject to the same 
influences, the same diseases, living in the same 
surroundings. But suddenly a few in one gener- 
ation are lifted as great ships are lifted by un- 
seen tides, and are rolled far onward and upward 
on the stream of events. What is it ? The effect 
of power may be called an Exodus, Hke that 
which took the Israelites from Egypt ; an Ad- 
vent, like the coming of Jesus Christ ; a Rcnais- 

* "The Unseen Universe," p. 245. 



238 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

sance, like that of the Middle Ages ; a Refor- 
mation, like that which Luther led ; or a great 
religious revival which sweeps over a whole na- 
tion without warning, and leads men to live as in 
the presence of their King. The name is noth- 
ing. The fact is that the unseen has opened its 
doors; from somewhere beyond natural causes 
there have rushed in influences and forces purely 
spiritual, moving men to daring deeds as they 
were moved in the Crusades ; leading them to 
self-sacrifice, as missionaries have been led ; in- 
citing them to revolutions, as those were inspired 
who laid the foundations of liberty on our shores. 
These tides of influence, coming suddenly, doing 
marvelous things, lifting individuals, communi- 
ties, and States to higher thinking and nobler 
living — whence are they ? All from the unseen. 
That revival and that revolution have lines run- 
ning from them to the unseen universe ; along 
those lines thrill inspirations which change the 
currents of history and sometimes transform 
even the face of nature. They are outside the 
limits of physical causation, but are as evident 
as rocks and lakes. Yesterday they were not ; 
to-day they are ; to-morrow the world will be 
changed. They are all timed in the interests of 
progress. They find a natural lodgment in human 
hearts ; they all point toward a realm above 
that which is visible. 

The student of nature and of history has laid 
his message at our feet and told us that both 



THE INVISIBLE REALM, 239 

have spoken to him of a sphere above the physi- 
cal, which moulds it but which is independent of 
it ; a realm from which issue influences that take 
hold of love and will and thought. This is what 
we have been seeking. If we could only be sure 
that not all things are physical and subject to 
physical laws, we might believe that that in us 
which lives and loves and thinks and wills is inde- 
pendent of the body which seems to imprison it. 

And just here chimes in the music of revelation. 
Listen to these passages : "' And when the serv- 
ant of the man of God was risen early, and gone 
forth, behold, a host compassed the city both 
with horses and chariots. And his servant said 
unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do? 
.... And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray 
thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the 
Lord opened the eyes of the young man ; and he 
saw : and behold, the mountain was full of horses 
and chariots of fire round about Elisha.*' ^^ Are 
they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to min- 
ister for them who shall be heirs of salvation ?" 
'' As is the earthy, such are they also that are 
earthy : and as is the heavenly, such are they also 
that are heavenly." 

Thus, then, science, history, experience, the 
Bible, all point toward the unseen universe as 
existing in the present and influencing the pres- 
ent. If our eyes could only be opened like those 
of the servant of Elisha, we might see that horses 
and chariots of fire are guarding many a poor 



240 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

man's household, and fighting for many a tempted 
man in his struggle with evil. 

As we look backward, all things issue from the 
unseen which must have been as real as the pres- 
ent order, — a realm of life, thought, love, and 
will, since all these exist now and we cannot 
think of them as self-originating. We look tow- 
ard the future when the elements shall melt with 
fervent heat, and find that that catastrophe can- 
not be annihilation, but only change of form ; 
that the energy which has been will be ; and we 
find also no reason to think that life, thought, 
will, and love will cease, for they existed in the 
former chaos, and why not in the later ? We look 
around us and find that even the physical world 
is changed by forces which reach out of sight, 
and that history has, all along, been subject to 
irruptions of power which have stimulated love 
and thought and will; and therefore we know 
that the unseen universe, the palace of light, is as 
real to-day as before the foundations of the world 
were laid. To all this is added the sure word 
of Revelation, confirming, at every point, what has 
been learned from the study of nature and of 
history. 

These facts harmonize with the deathless hun- 
ger of humanity. If life apart from the body is 
now, always has been, and always shall be, it is at 
least a little easier to believe that, for us, dying is 
only laying aside the poor garments which have so 
long hampered and hidden the immortal spirit. 



THE IX VISIBLE REALM. 24 1 

O, how we long to draw aside the veil ! O, if we 
could only catch one little glimpse I But the veil 
is never rifted, and beyond it our dear ones have 
gone, and toward it we are hastening with a swift- 
ness that is startling. 

What can we do? Certain things we can do. 
We can study God's works and his Word, and 
gather all the knowledge possible; we can live 
lives that shall be fit to survive death; we can 
trust the only One who claims to have come into 
the visible from the unseen universe, when he 
says: '' Because I live, ye shall live also." And 
one thing more : Vv'e can keep so pure and peace- 
ful that if ever it should happen that one of the 
shining ones from out the palace of light should 
come to you or to me, he would find our spirits 
waiting for the fulfillment of the Beatitude: 
*' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God." 



XII. 

The Endless Growth. 



" Mere orthodoxy is deadly heresy. The purely intellectual 
unity reached through a purely intellectual assent is no opera- 
tion of the Spirit: but where the Spirit is not, life is not; and 
where life is not, death is." — Robert Flint, D.D., LL.D. 

" The greatest things, the most vital, do not lie within the 
scope of our powers, yet, as they belong to us, they may be con- 
fidently awaited." — Theodore T. Hunger, D.D. 

" Though you may accelerate growth, you cannot anticipate 
the after- products before the intermediate steps have been taken. 
Men desire to be like Paul in the culmination of his experiences, 
but they do not want to be like him in the detached steps by 
which he came to these experiences. Men want to be deep, but 
they do not want God to dig the well. In God's house there 
are many things, yet there is an order that belongs to those 
things and that order cannot be changed." — Henry Wapd 
Beecher. 

" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." — Tennyson. 

** Build thee miore stately mansions, O my soul. 
As the swift seasons roll ! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea !" 
— Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



XII. 

The Endless Growth. 

** I am come that they might have life, and that they might 
have it more abundantly." — JoJm x. lo. 

It is the sage remark of John Ruskin that 
about nothing is the average man so ignorant as 
of the world around him. Consequently, when 
he sees a true representation of a tree, or of a 
nook in a meadow, or a sweeping vista of radiant 
sky, it often seems to be untrue to nature. Many 
people, apparently live in the Bible and yet are 
ignorant of its simplest statements. In their 
youth and enthusiasm they caught certain 
phrases of interpretation, were impressed by cer- 
tain sermons or men, and ever afterward have 
carried those partial and crude conceptions of 
truth into the Bible and made it bend to them. 
How often we hear the expression, '' That is not 
the way I was taught," implying that the good 
man or woman who taught years ago was infalli- 
ble. It is quite as possible that error was taught 
when we were young, as that it is to-day, and it 
is sure that men were then no more consecrated 
and anxious to know the truth than they are 
now. Many take the conceptions formed when 
they were young and not qualified to weigh opin- 



246 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

ion, and forever after interpret the whole Word 
of God by some partial ideas, which lingered in 
memory because they happened to make a vivid 
impression on their minds when first heard. 

Hov/ many persons who walk though a forest 
know the individuality of the trees, the special 
homes of the flowers, the peculiar notes of the 
birds ? 

Some things with which we are best ac- 
quainted we know least. And the Bible is like 
the universe with its deep heavens shining w^ith 
stars, with its forests of variegated trees and 
plants, with its choirs of singing birds, and its 
broad expanse of rippling waters. Familiarity 
with the words of the Bible sometimes makes 
men impervious to its meaning. Take for an 
illustration the word '^ life.'' It is one of the great 
words of the New Testamxcnt. ^^ I am come that 
they might have life, and that they might have it 
more abundantly.'' *^Ye will not come to me, 
that ye might have life." And so the changes 
are rung on this one word. Properly understood 
*^ life" settles many questions, but its essential 
significance must be learned in order to know its 
bearing on opinion and conduct. A word may 
be in the New Testament and yet mean no 
more to the mind than a bird in a tree means 
to a man thinking of stocks and real estate. 
Life ! What is it ? It is something that must 
effect growth or cease to exist. It cannot remain 
stationary. Only death makes no progress. Jesus 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH. 247 

came that we might have hfe, — that is, might 
grow. 

Again, hfe necessitates diversity. How diversi- 
fied is the face of nature ! It is the product of 
the one energy which proceeds from the sun ; but 
it runs in the deer, roars in the hon, blossoms in 
trees, beautifies gardens, and makes possible the 
physical existence of man. No two things alive 
are exactly alike. Dr. Clifford, in his recent ad- 
dress delivered upon taking the chair at the 
meeting of the Baptist Union in London, ex- 
pressed the truth in epigrammatic words: ^^ The 
living differ ; it is the dead who agree.'' Life al- 
ways and ineffably works diversity. 

It also organizes its own body. The life 
in the acorn draws out of the earth, the air, 
the sunshine, and the rain, that which it or- 
ganizes into a tree. Throughout the universe, 
life organizes its own body. In what form life 
shall grow, no one can determine. Take a bulb 
of lily-of-the-valley and say to it: I want all 
the flowers in my garden to be roses, and you 
must grow and bear roses. And what will be the 
effect ? There will be no answer ; but as soon as 
the suns have become warm, the broad green 
leaf and the dainty white flower will rise before 
your eyes totally independent of your order. 
Life tolerates no dictation. Dead things maybe 
moulded, but life never. '' I have come to give 
you the very life that is in me,*' the Master said. 
Do not think that you can compel it to do your 



248 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

bidding. If you cannot compel a lily-of-the- 
valley, you cannot expect to control the life of 
God. Let it grow. When our Lord said that 
he came to give life, he did not change or qual- 
ify the meaning of the word. It is something 
which grows, which growls into diversified form, 
and which manifests itself in such a body as it 
may select for itself. Our study to-day is devoted 
to this one characteristic of spiritual life: — It 
must grow, until it begins to die; if it never 
dies, it must eternally grow. How do we know 
this? 

Spiritual life manifests itself by growth in 
knowledge. Only a small part of the physical 
universe is yet known. Since the beginnings of 
science, there has been constant advancement. 
Each discovery has stimulated farther investiga- 
tion, but the wonderful inventions and discover- 
ies of the past sometimes obscure the reality and 
extent of human ignorance. Investigation has 
only begun. Not one of the fundamental in- 
quiries has yielded its secret. Concerning the 
origin of life and of language we are no wiser 
than our fathers. The most daring explorers in 
the realm of science have only been like farmers 
who now and then turn up curiosities as they 
plow the surface of the ground, not like miners 
who find gold in the depths of the earth. If 
there is this limitation in the knowledge of physi- 
cal things, much more is it to be expected in the 
spiritual sphere. Indeed, it is probable that the 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH, 249 

search for the causes of physical things will never 
be successful until they are sought in the realm 
of spirit. But there is as yet little knowledge of 
anything spiritual. Nothing is known of the na- 
ture of spirit ; there are few clear ideas about it, 
except in the minds of those who have given it 
their lives. Little is known about God. The 
answer of the Catechism to the question, "- What 
is God?" is a confession of ignorance. And yet 
each day we are dealing with this most stupen- 
dous reality. We are attempting to regulate the 
time piece of our lives by the Sun which 
shines in eternity. Nothing is known of God, 
apart from revelation, except that he is power- 
ful and wise. Beyond this, the most that 
can be said is that he seems sometimes good 
and sometimes evil. He sends light and glad- 
ness : he also sends pestilence and misery. 
What is known of man? Hardly more than 
of God. The mysteries of thought, of will, of 
affection, are untouched. Is the body the man, 
or does he inhabit the body? Will the man con- 
tinue to exist when the body decays? If so, in 
what form will he appear? What powers will 
he have ? Where w^ill he be? And so questions 
might be multiplied. *^ But we have revelation." 
Yes ; and let nothing obscure that supreme 
fact. But when we ask ourselves, How much is 
revealed ? the answer can be hardly more than 
this — All that we need, to live by. And those 
of us who most gladly accept revelation are most 



250 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

overwhelmed by the problems which clamor for 
solution. 

A man has been taught to believe in God, and 
does believe in him. Suddenly the home is 
broken, his wife dies, his wealth goes, and at 
middle-age everything is in ruins. A person, 
impotent to understand how such things can be 
and God yet be good, is no uncommon spectacle. 
We are conscious that we are free ; that we can 
choose for ourselves ; that no power in heaven or 
hell can compel our wills ; and yet that conscious- 
ness is hedged about with facts equally evident. 
The man who knows that he is free knows also 
that he is a bundle of tendencies which have 
come from his ancestors, knows that he has the 
appetite which his father had, that he has the 
weakness which was in his mother; he sees that 
he has been put where he is by unseen powers ; 
that he had no choice in his parentage, no option 
as to time or place of birth, no voice in choosing 
his environment. There seems to be an eternal 
enmity between these facts. And yet both are 
facts. But where is the harmony ? That is in 
the unseen. 

These questions are sufficient for illustration. 
They might be indefinitely multiplied. They 
will arise, and it is the sheerest absurdity to ex- 
pect that they can be suppressed. God has ar- 
ranged things to stimulate thought. He means 
that we shall gain wisdom by growth. The 
surest way to make infidels is to tell an intelli- 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH, 2$! 

gent person that he should not ask such ques- 
tions. They may not be answered, but they can- 
not be suppressed without death. An acorn 
may be suppressed, but there will then be no 
tree. An inquirer may say : ^^ Everything is in 
confusion ; these questions point toward absolute 
darkness and therefore they are of no impor- 
tance to me." Or he may deny everything and 
say, ^' There can be no God, no goodness, no life 
beyond, no reconciliation between freedom and 
necessity, no way of escape from the power of 
evil." Or he may follow the course suggested by 
the analogy of life. Life necessitates growth. 
These questions reach into the invisible. We 
learn by growing. Men know more than their 
children. The children of each new generation 
begin in advance of those who preceded them. 
These subjects are the endless study. We know 
but little, but revelation has assured us that 
eternity is ours. The things which are not seen 
are eternal. If now we once grasp the idea of 
endless life, we have also the necessity of endless 
growth, and endless growth carries with it end- 
less increase in knowledge. This stage of exist- 
ence is largely occupied by the contest between 
the physical and spiritual. It is enough to know 
that the spiritual will surely triumph, that God 
is, and that eternity is ours. But what about 
God ? Let us keep on inquiring, reading our 
Bibles, interrogating nature, studying history; 
the knowledge will come as rapidly as we are 



252 SPIRIT AND 11 FE, 

prepared for it. As each new century brings 
new disclosures of the glory of the physical uni- 
verse, so each new stage in our existence will 
bring some new advance in spiritual things. 
This ought to be expected. The interpretations 
of childhood and youth are never final ; they are 
valuable as stepping-stones to wider outlooks 
and truer visions. The knowledge of a man 
ought to be to his knowledge when a youth, as 
an elm-tree to a sapling. When a man says, '' I 
stand to-day just where I did twenty years ago," 
there are only two conclusions possible : either 
he was perfect then, or he is dead now. 

What a vista is opened by this thought of 
endless growth in knowledge — forever finding out 
something more of God, forever finding some 
new meaning in the mystery of his love, forever 
learning how to reconcile the individual with 
his constantly-changing environment ! What a 
terrible world this must have been before the 
creation was complete, when molten masses fell 
upon the earth in fiery rain, when there was 
neither day nor night, but only desolation and 
infinite and eternal confusion. But that was a 
necessary stage in the development of the uni- 
verse; and the ''soaring and radiant mountains," 
the variegated forests, the emerald meadows, the 
gardens rich with flowers, '' the valleys in which 
kingdoms nestle," the evening sky reflecting soft 
splendors, are only parts of another stage in the 
development of the same world. So, out of the 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH, 253 

confusion of thought, a day will come when 
knowledge shall have grown, when the revelation 
which is now only in part shall be increased, 
when we shall see no more through a glass 
darkly, when the light of eternity shall rest on 
what is now in shadow. Endless growth in 
knowledge ! Let us not be in haste ; God will 
disclose himself as fast as man is able to receive 
him. The largest revelation is always to the most 
spiritual. As power to receive and to appreciate 
increases, the depths will give up their secrets ; 
and this will go on forever, for the finite will 
always find something to learn about the infinite. 
None need be troubled because they are not 
where they were yesterday in knowledge, be- 
cause they have had to lay aside what once was 
sacred. The oak must lay aside the acorn-shell, 
if it would grow. But let that man be afraid, 
who for one moment finds himself inclined to 
relax the feeling of obligation to obey the truth 
as fast as it shall be made known, or willing to rest 
in what has already been received. *^ Grow in 
grace and in knowledge," is the apostle's exhor- 
tation. '^This is life eternal, that they might 
know thee, the only true God," are the words of 
our Master. Eternity will not be too long for 
man to learn about God. 

Spiritual life manifests itself in increasing power 
to endure and to do. Ability to endure is a plant 
of slow growth. Many distrust themselves and 
doubt their faith because they are able to meet 



254 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

the experiences of life with so Httle fortitude. 
They forget that ability to endure is one of 
the last and finest fruits of the divine life. 
They have also failed to observe that the 
richest gifts of Providence are not given out- 
right, but gradually. God gives wisdom to 
those w^ho ask, but he gives it in the only way 
it is ever given, by a process of experience. 
Knowledge may be flashed on the mind, but 
wisdom cannot come suddenly. Patience in the 
midst of sorrow and calamity is slowly developed. 
He who has pain and disappointment repeated, 
and yet is untroubled by them, must have a shal- 
low nature. In proportion as he has loved must 
a man mourn for those he loses, until he has 
learned that even death may be gain. God may 
make a revelation as the result of a process just 
as truly as by a flash of light. His method of 
teaching courage and fortitude is by allowing his 
children to grow into the wisdom and strength 
which they need. The most patient and heroic 
spirits have learned endurance by enduring. 
Trees become strong by being beaten upon by 
tempests. The Sequoias do not grow in valleys, 
but on mountains where the storms of three 
thousand years have buffeted them. Soldiers 
are seldom brave in their first battle. When 
they have become accustomed to the roar of 
guns and the sights of death, they will dare any- 
thing. The brave and patient are seldom the 
young. Youth is often careless, and with it 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH. 255 

heedlessness sometimes passes for courage ; but 
those who can look calamity in the face and 
calmly wait for it, have grown strong through 
experience. That woman whom you envy so 
much, v/ho is quiet and patient and keeps such a 
beautiful trust, do you know her history? She is 
not very young. Long ago she had a friend dear 
to her as her own life : one was taken, and the 
other left. She idolized her father : one day he 
went away without a good-by, and has never 
come back. She and her mother were insepara- 
ble, until, without warning, that companionship 
was broken. She had a home of her own, and 
her broken heart was mended by new loves ; the 
shadows had almost disappeared when again, and 
again, and again the raven wing darkened her 
household. And to-day she is alone. Every one 
loves her, she is interested in all good things, 
many have already learned to call her blessed : 
and yet she is every now and then compelled to 
listen to such words as these: ^^If I only had 
such a disposition as you have, then I should not 
suffer as I do ; you cannot imagine how lonely I 
am." That woman could reply, if she would : 
** My dear friend, I have been just where you 
are ; I know what it is to fight God ; I know what 
it is to beat my wings against the bars of my 
cage; I have just the same kind of nature that 
you have. I was not always as you see me ; by 
trusting God in dark hours, I have grown to 
know that he does all thing-s well." That woman 



256 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

who inspires by her courage is as truly a growth 
as the tree in the garden which is glorious to-day 
with its coloring of blossoms, and which will bend 
to-morrow beneath its burden of fruit. Life 
grows. 

The positive virtues are the result of growth. 
One very rich man once said to another: ^^ I wish 
I knew how to give as you do. Why, it seems 
to make you happy to give money ; but, some way, 
I don't know how to do it.'' He did not know 
how, but such men must learn. The life of 
Christ growing in a man's heart will some time 
compel him to empty his pocket. Christ was 
generous. His message and ministry alike ex- 
press love which manifests itself at cost. He 
gave himself for humanity. Those who become 
like him sooner or later become one with him. 
The result is inevitable. Wherever Christ's 
life is, it must grow; and, perhaps by painful 
processes, perhaps by causing great losses, it will 
compel generosity. Many at the beginning of 
the spiritual life, and sometimes long afterward, 
are like the soil into which a seed has fallen. 
Poor, stupid dirt ! does it think it can remain the 
same when that seed begins to grow and to 
make the garden beautiful ? No ; the earth must 
help toward the growth with its riches ; and the 
quicker the lesson is learned, the better. 

Regard for the opinions of others is a growth. 
The young are usually narrow, and the elderly 
tolerant. It requires time to learn that all 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH, 2$7 

wisdom, intelligence, and consecration were not 
condensed in the little valley where we were born 
and trained. It requires time to adjust the sight 
to all the relations of truth. At first we see but 
little of what we hold as our faith. By and by 
we realize that what we thought we held entirely 
in our little hands is so great and glorious that it 
fills the universe. Then w^e ask ourselves if we 
know all of anything vv^hich we cannot see en- 
tirely around ; w^e begin to understand that those 
on the other side of the truth which we are look- 
ing at must see what we cannot, as we see what 
is dark to them. And then, from fighting them, 
we come at length to say: ^^ Let us tell one 
another v/hat each has seen; and though I cannot 
go where you are and you cannot come Avhere I 
am, we can each add to the wisdom of the other.'' 
Thus we grow more tolerant — not of error, for 
there never ought to be tolerance of error — but 
of those who are looking at the same truth, and 
who are equally anxious to learn all its lessons. 
The sincere man finds as the years go by that he 
has made many mistakes. A scientist finds that 
nine-tenths of the experiments of Science yield 
no results. They are mistakes, and yet are helps ; 
for they show where truth is not. Do we make 
no experiments in our faith ? Let us pity the 
man who answers '^ No." We make mistakes 
in reading our Bibles, and in interpreting them. 
Doubtless the early Church was honest when it 
burned heretics. The doctors of the Inquisition 



258 SPIRIT AND LIFE, 

were probably trying to serve God. Loyola was 
as sincere as Luther. Such men misread their 
Bible. If they had lived to properly understand 
it they would have repudiated their own action. 
The ministers in the South thought that the Bible 
upheld slavery ; they preached that : we may 
honor their loyalty to conviction, but God taught 
them that the Bible was a larger and better book 
than they had dreamed. Those who realize how 
many mistakes they make are not anxious to 
climb into the judgment-seat to judge others. As 
men grow older they study more and more to 
find the truth which each consecrated soul has 
found, rather than opportunities to emphasize 
a brother's mistakes. Those who look back 
over many years, and see them lined by nar- 
rowness and prejudice, who see how often they 
have fallen, how often they have been helped 
to know God better and to love one another bet- 
ter by the very ones whom they most distrusted, 
are most ready to say, "' Brethren, the clouds are 
thick and dark about us; breakers are not far off; 
the sea is high. Let us all pull together, let us 
bear with each other patiently, and leave it for 
God to guide us all.'* 

Things are now as they always have been. 
Each age thinks it is an age of transition ; each 
generation thinks that all which was held sacred 
in the past is in danger. There are now, as 
always, a conservative and a radical element. 
Each party is anxious for its own success, each 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH. 259 

is about equally anxious to call hard names and 
to misjudge those on the other side, each thinks 
it has all of the truth ; while the fact is that all 
progress is the result of a process of action and 
reaction, and both conservatism and radicalism 
are essential. The Progressive is needed to push 
ahead and explore, and the Conservative is 
needed to keep him from going too fast and from 
forgetting the things already settled. Both con- 
servatism and radicalism are manifestations of 
the life of God. Those whom God has joined 
together, let not man put asunder. As we get 
nearer Christ and are able to look from heights 
of age and experience, we can understand how he 
could have spoken words which are apparently so 
contradictory. ''He that is not with me is 
against me ;'* and, '' He that is not against us is 
for us." Both sayings are from the lips of 
Christ. Men may be unjust, ungenerous, un- 
kind ; they may forget the Golden Rule and the 
commandments of love ; their tempers may flame 
like fire ; but if they have the life^ it is growing, 
and some time the fruit will appear in sweeter, 
more generous, and more chastened spirits. 

Spiritual life manifests itself also by growth in 
capacity. A tree receives more light, air, and 
moisture, and casts more widely its hospitable 
shadows until the beginning of its decadence. 
If, now, any form of life exists forever, it follows 
of necessity that its capacity will forever in- 
crease. '' To him that hath shall more be griven.'* 



26o SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

As senses are made more sensitive by use, so are 
powers of spiritual receptivity enlarged as men 
become more spiritual ; and the process goes on 
through the ages. Savages can receive only hints 
of truth which to larger souls are commonplaces. 
A scientist lives in a different world from a 
peasant's because he can receive from mountain 
and lake, from sky and star, suggestions and im- 
pressions to which his humbler neighbor is im^- 
pervious. The more knowledge one possesses, 
the more it is possible to acquire. Certain truths 
are to us like stars at midnight, which are larger 
than the points of light we see ; to better eyes 
they expand into globes of fire, or into worlds 
with profuse vegetation and multitudinous life. 
So, to finer spiritual discernment, there will be 
larger and truer disclosures of the everlasting 
mysteries. Capacity to know God must increase 
with each new disclosure of God. This process 
will continue until growth ceases, or until there 
is no more to learn about the infinite. Eter- 
nal life necessitates eternal growth in capacity. 
Each soul that is open to God will, day by day, 
be able to receive and comprehend more of God. 
Capacity for sympathy must increase in the 
same ratio as capacity for knowledge. With his 
boundless sympathy, Christ entered perfectly into 
the human condition of other lives. He was sen- 
sitive to all wants and woes. He asked not 
whether men had names, but whether they had 
sorrows. He responded to the least touch of 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH. 261 

humanity as a harp responds to the faintest 
breath of the wind. Spiritual growth manifests 
itself in increased likeness to Christ ; the more 
like him, the larger the capacity for sympathy. 
He bore griefs and carried sorrows : and those 
like Christ ever enter more and more into the 
condition of others, and are ever gathering unto 
themselves the burden of the world's suffering 
and sin. But it may be asked : Will not the 
necessity for sympathy and service cease in the 
sphere to which we are moving ? In the sphere in 
which God is it has not ceased. It is not possi- 
ble to speak with authority about these things, 
but it may well be doubted whether the time will 
ever come when the universe will not be the 
abode of life in process of development toward 
higher conditions. Our system may be rolled 
together like a scroll and its elements melt with 
fervent heat, while still other systems fill immen- 
sity and are peopled with races moving evermore 
toward higher and finer states of existence. 
While such conditions endure, there v/ill remain 
limitless fields for activity. So long as it is per- 
mitted men to grow in likeness to the Divine, it 
must follow that capacity to sympathize with all 
that concerns humanity will become larger and 
more sensitive. The perfect Man sweat, as it 
were, great drops of blood, and his heart broke 
on the cross. His capacity for sympathy was too 
great for his physical body, and that was laid aside ; 
but his Spirit continues the ministry. Those 



262 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

who become like him may find themselves faint- 
ing and falling as the burden on their hearts 
grows heavier ; but let them learn from their 
Master that life and capacity continue to grow 
and bless when the physical shell is no longer 
able to contain them. What a state will be real- 
ized when the whole Church of God, entering 
into the human condition as Jesus Christ did, 
bears the griefs and carries the sorrows and sacri- 
fices for the sins of all the races of men ! 

Capacity for enjoyment will increase forever. 
Rothe once said, " Our organ of emotion is des- 
tined for eternity no less than our organ of 
understanding.'* Capacity for happiness, as well 
as capacity for knowledge, will never cease to 
grovv^. This also is inevitable. Much sorrow 
results from inability to express emotion. Strains 
of music rouse not memories, not hopes, not clear 
ideas, but rather lead up from interior silences 
tides of feeling which have no voice. Great 
thoughts, thrilling joys, boundless aspirations 
almost reach expression and yet are held down by 
invisible hands. Melancholy results. If these 
emxOtions had utterance, all existence would be 
glorified. Happiness is largely freedom from 
limitation. Limitations fall aside with spiritual 
growth, and individuals are able to be themselves. 
Maturity can enjoy more than childhood. Each 
well-spent year cuts more of the cords which bind 
to annoyance and weariness. Joy enlarges the 
capacity for joy, as thinking strengthens ability to 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH, 263 

think. The gladness of the present is not worthy 
to be compared with the glory which shall be 
revealed in us. The happiness of the future is 
symboHzed in the revelation by music ; by that 
majestic and glorious symbolism, is taught the 
lesson that the joy of eternity is too great for 
description in human words : it can only be hinted 
at by the language of the unutterable. Songs, 
voices of many waters, harpers harping, great 
and marvelous music, these aptly symbolize the 
happiness of the redeemed. The future joy 
made the cross endurable to the Master. 

A rose can receive more sunlight than a bud ; 
a tree can shelter more singing birds than a single 
branch : so a human soul which through loss and 
much discipline has grown out of narrow con- 
ditions and away from false ideals, into a state of 
trust and reliance on the love that never fails, has 
capacities for enjoyment which smaller natures 
never possess. The only voice of the higher 
spiritual life is a song. Endless life necessitates 
endless growth in capacity to receive, to sym- 
pathize, and to enjoy. 

Such possibilities, nay, such necessities, are 
before all who are born from above. The work 
of Christ cannot be measured by its results in 
time. Its object is, age by age, to lead men more 
and more toward the perfection of God, while 
age by age each becomes more and more like 
God and better able to comprehend revelations 
from Him. Our subject leaves all humble and 



264 SPIRIT AND LIFE. 

obedient souls in endless light. The begin- 
ning is in pain and limitation and loss ; the 
culmination is without end, in glory everlasting. 

O my friend, you who feel as if you had 
nothing, you who feel as if everything you ever 
longed for has been denied you, you who feel 
that you are of no account in this world and were 
better out of it, remember that if God did not 
want you here he would not allow you here. 
Remember also that you are being prepared for 
your eternal mission just like every other soul who 
has ever been anything or done anything, — 
by growth. Let the life grow. And you who are 
impatient because of the slowness with which 
some are progressing, who are troubled by their 
narrowness, or intolerance, or radicalism, let not 
your heart be troubled. There is more good in 
all men than their mistakes. You are judging by 
failures rather than successes. And remember 
that perhaps the one whom you criticise is grow- 
ing toward God quite as fast as you; only while 
you are putting out fruit which is called tolerance, 
generosity, temperance, he is bearing fruit equally 
rich and beautiful which is called faith, activity, 
fidelity. 

Life is a prophecy, but also a fulfillment. It 
grows. Even our divine Master when on earth, 
who took it upon him *^to fulfill all righteous- 
ness," from his earliest years showed us the way 
of God's unvarying law for life, physical and 
spiritual, — he " increased in wisdom and in stat^ 



THE ENDLESS GROWTH. 265 

ure, and in favor with God and man." God's life 
will fill the earth, and in individuals will continue to 
grow throughout eternity. Who will attempt to 
describe the final condition of those who now are 
narrow, intolerant, unkind, selfish, when the good 
which has been im.planted by Christ shall have 
had eternity in w^hich to expand ? It is enough 
to know that the life of the Son of God, growing 
in us more and more beneath the unshaded sun 
and by the living Avaters, will increase and expand 
until, in the everlasting blessedness of Paradise, 
there shall be realized the things which eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived, but 
which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him. 



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